
Glass. 
Book 



] . t 



/^, 



OUT TO WIN 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES 

CARRY ON: 
Letters in Wartibie 

SLAVES OF FREEDOM 

THE RAFT 

THE GARDEN WITHOUT WALLS 

THE SEVENTH CHRISTMAS 

THE UNKNOfra COUNTRY 

THE ROAD TO AVALON 

FLORENCE ON A CERTAIN 
NIGHT 

THE WORKER AND OTHER 
POEMS 



OUT TO WIN 

THE STORY OF AMERICA 
IN FRANCE 



BY 

CONINGSBY DAWSON 

Author of 

"The Glory of the Trenches," 

"CAiiiY On: Letters in Wartdo:," Etc. 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
MCMXVIII 



vlto U c I 'S 



-^^ \ 



\ 



'^ 



Copyright, 1918, 
By John Lane Company 






Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York. U. S. A. 



TO 

My American Friends and Brothers-in-Arms 

this frank appreciation of their effort 

in france is dedicated 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Preface For Fools Only 9 

**We've Got Four Years" 29 

War As A Job 61 

The War of Compassion 109 

The Last War 196 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 

I am not writing this preface for the conscious 
fool, but for his self -deceived brother who con- 
siders himself a very wise person. My hope is 
that some persons may recognise themselves and 
be provided with food for thought. They will 
usually be people who have contributed little to 
this war, except mean views and endless talk. 
Had they shared the sacrifice of it, they would 
have developed within themselves the faculty for 
a wider generosity. The extraordinary thing 
about generosity is its eagerness to recognise it- 
self in others. 

You find these untravelled critics and mischief- 
makers on both sides of the Atlantic. In most 
cases they have no definite desire to work harm, 
but they have inherited cantankerous prejudices 
which date back to the American Revolution, and 
they lack the vision to perceive that this war, de- 
spite its horror and tragedy, is the God-given 
chance of centuries to re-unite the great Anglo- 
Saxon races of the world in a truer bond of kind- 
ness and kinship. If we miss tliis chance we are 

9 



lo OUT TO WIN 

flinging in God's face His splendid recompense 
for our common heroism. 

It is an unfortunate fact that the merely fool- 
ish person constitutes as grave a danger as the 
deliberate plotter. His words, if they are acid 
enough, are quoted and re-quoted. They pass 
from mouth to mouth, gaining in authority. By 
the time they reach the friendly country at which 
they are directed, they have taken on the appear- 
ance of an opinion representative of a nation. 
The Hun is well aware of the value of gossip for 
the encouraging of divided counsels among his 
enemies. He invents a slander, pins it to some 
racial grievance, confides it to the fools among 
the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some 
of them wander about in a merely private capac- 
ity, nagging without knowledge, depositing poi- 
son, breeding doubts as to integrity, and all the 
while pretending to maintain a mildly impartial 
and judicial mental attitude. Their souls never 
rise from the ground. Their brains are gangren- 
ous with memories of cancelled malice. They 
suspect hero-worship; it smacks to them of senti- 
ment. They examine, but never praise. Being 
incapable of sacrifice, they find something mere- 
triciously melodramatic about men and nations 
who are capable. Had they lived nineteen hun- 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY ii 

dred years ago, they would have haunted Calvary 
to discover fraud. 

Then, there are others, by far more dangerous. 
These make their appearance daily in the morn- 
ing press, thrusting their pessimisms across our 
breakfast tables, beleaguering our faith with ill- 
natured judgements and querulous warnings. One 
of our London Dailies, for instance, specializes in 
annoying America; it works as effectively to 
breed distrust as if its policy were dictated from 
Berlin. 

I have just returned from a prolonged tour of 
America's activities in France. Wherever I went 
I heard nothing but unstinted appreciation of 
Great Britain's surpassing gallantry : "W^e never 
knew that you Britishers were what you are; 
you never told us. We had to come over here 
to find out." When that had been said I always 
waited, for I guessed the qualifying statement 
that would follow : "There's only one thing that 
makes us mad. Why the devil does your censor 

allow the P to sneer at us every morning? 

Your army doesn't feel that way towards us; at 
least, if it ever did, it doesn't now. Are there 
really people in England who ?" 

At this point I would cut my questioner short : 
"There are men so short-sighted in every coun- 
try that, to warm their hands, they would bum 



12 OUT TO WIN 

the crown of thorns. You have them in America. 
Such men are not representative." 

The purpose of this book is to tell what Amer- 
ica has done, is doing, and, on the strength of her 
splendid and accomplished facts, to plead for a 
closer friendship between my two countries. As 
an Englishman who has lived in the States for 
ten years and is serving with the Canadian 
Forces, I feel that I have a sympathetic under- 
standing of the affections and aloofnesses of 
both nations; as a member of both families I 
claim the domestic right of indulging in a little 
plain speaking to each in turn. 

In my appeal I leave the fighting men out of 
the question. Death is a universal teacher of 
charity. At the end of the war the men who 
survive will acknowledge no kinship save the 
kinship of courage. To have answered the call 
of duty and to have played the man, will make a 
closer bond than having been born of the same 
mother. At a New York theatre last October I 
met some French officers who had fought on the 
right of the Canadian Corps frontage at the 
Somme. We got to talking, commenced remem- 
bering, missed the entire performance and parted 
as old friends. In France I stayed with an Amer- 
ican-Irish Division. They were for the most part 
American citizens in the second generation : few 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 13 

of them had been to Ireland. As frequently hap- 
pens, they were more Irish than the Irish. They 
had learned from their parents the abuses which 
had driven them to emigrate, but had no knowl- 
edge of the reciprocal provocations which had 
caused the abuses. Consequently, when they 
sailed on their troop-ships for France they were 
anti-British almost to a man — many of them 
were theoretically Sinn Feiners. They were com- 
ing to fight for France and for Lafayette, who 
had helped to lick Britain — but not for the Brit- 
ish. By the time I met them they were marvel- 
lously changed. They were going into the line 
almost any day and — this was what had worked 
the change — they had been trained for their or- 
deal by British N. C. O.'s and officers. They 
had swamped their hatred and inherited bitter- 
ness in admiration. Their highest hope was that 
they might do as well as the British. "They're 
men if you like," they said. In the imminence 
of death, their feeling for these old-timers, who 
had faced death so often, amounted to hero-wor- 
ship. It was good to hear them deriding the 
caricature of the typical Briton, which had served 
in their mental galleries as an exact likeness for 
so many years. It was proof to me that men who 
have endured the same hell in a common cause 
will be nearer in spirit, when the war is ended, 



14 OUT TO WIN 

than they are to their own civiHan populations. 
For in all belligerent countries there are two 
armies fighting — the military and the civilian; 
either can let the other down. If the civilian 
army loses its morale, its vision, its unselfishness, 
and allows itself to be out-bluffed by the civilian 
army of Germany, it as surely betrays its soldiers 
as if it joined forces with the Hun. We execute 
soldiers for cowardice; it's a pity that the same 
law does not govern the civilian army. There 
would be a rapid revision in the tone of more than 
one English and American newspaper. A soldier 
is shot for cowardice because his example is con- 
tagious. What can be more contagious than a 
panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated ? Al- 
ready there are many of us who have a kindlier 
feeling and certainly more respect for a Boche 
who fights gamely, than for a Britisher or Amer- 
ican who bickers and sulks in comfort. Only one 
doubt as to ultimate victory ever assails the West- 
em Front : that it may be attacked in the rear by 
the premature peace negotiations of the civil pop- 
ulations it defends. Should that ever happen, the 
Western Front would cease to be a mixture of 
French, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brit- 
ish and Belgians ; it would become a nation by it- 
self, pledged to fight on till the ideals for which 
it set out to fight are definitely established. 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 15 

We get rather tired of reading speeches in 
which civiHans presume that the making of peace 
is in their hands. The making may be, but the 
acceptance is in ours. I do not mean that we 
love war for war's sake. We love it rather less 
than the civilian does. When an honourable peace 
has been confirmed, there will be no stauncher 
pacifist than the soldier; but we reserve our 
pacifism till the war is won. We shall be the last 
people in Europe to get war-weary. We started 
with a vision — the achieving of justice; we shall 
not grow weary till that vision has become a real- 
ity. When one has faced up to an ultimate self- 
denial, giving becomes a habit. One becomes 
eager to be allowed to give all — to keep none of 
life's small change. The fury of an ideal en- 
fevers us. We become fanatical to outdo our 
own best record in self -surrender. Many of us, 
if we are alive when peace is declared, will feel 
an uneasy reproach that perhaps we did not give 
enough. 

This being the spirit of our soldiers, it is easy 
to understand their contempt for those civilians 
who go on strike, prate of weariness, scream their 
terror when a few Flun planes sail over London, 
devote columns in their papers to pin-prick trage- 
dies of food-shortage, and cloud the growing gen- 
erosity between England and America by cavilling 



i6 OUT TO WIN 

criticisms and mean reflections. Their contempt 
is not that of the fighter for the man of peace; 
but the scorn of the man who is doing his duty 
for the shirker, 

A Tommy is reading a paper in a muddy 
trench. Suddenly he scowls, laughs rather fiercely 
and calls to his pal, jerking his head as a sign to 
him to hurry. " 'Ere Bill, listen to wot this 'ere 
cry-baby says. 'E thinks we're losin' the bloom- 
in' war 'cause 'e didn't get an egg for breakfast. 
Losin' the war! A lot 'e knows abart it. A 
blinkin' lot 'e's done either to win or lose it. Yus, 
I don't think! Thank Gawd, we've none of 'is 
sort up front." 

To men who have gazed for months with the 
eyes of visionaries on sudden death, it comes as 
a shock to discover that back there, where life is 
so sweetly certain, fear still strides unabashed. 
They had thought that fear was dead — stifled by 
heroism. They had believed that personal little- 
ness had given way before the magnanimity of 
martyrdom. 

In this plea, then, for a firmer Anglo-American 
friendship I address the civilian populations of 
both countries. The fate of such a friendship is 
in their hands. In the Eden of national destinies 
God is walking; yet there are those who bray their 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 17 

ancient grievances so loudly that they all but 
drown the sound of His footsteps. 

Being an Englishman it will be more courteous 
to commence with the fools of my own flesh and 
blood. Let me paint a contrast. 

Last October I sailed back from New York 
with a company of American officers; they con- 
sisted in the main of trained airmen, Navy ex- 
perts and engineers. Before my departure the 
extraordinary sternness of America, her keen- 
ness to rival her allies in self-denial, her willing 
mobilisation of all her resources, had confirmed 
my optimism gained in the trenches, that the Al- 
lies must win; the mere thought of compromise 
was impossible and blasphemous. This optimism 
was enhanced on the voyage by the conduct of 
the officers who were my companions. They 
carried their spirit of dedication to an excess that 
was almost irksome. They refused to play cards. 
They were determined not to relax. Every min- 
ute they could snatch was spent in studying text- 
books. Their country had come into the war so 
late that they resented any moment lost from 
making themselves proficient. When exjx)stulated 
with they explained themselves by saying, "When 
we've done our bit it will be time to amuse our- 
selves." They were dull company, but, in a time 
of war, inspiring. All their talk was of when 



i8 OUT TO WIN 

they reached England. Their enthusiasm for the 
Britisher was such that they expected to be swept 
into a rarer atmosphere by the closer contact with 
heroism. 

We had an Englishman with us — obviously a 
consumptive. He typified for them the dogged- 
ness of British pluck. He had been through the 
entire song and dance of the Mexican Revolution ; 
a dozen times he had been lined up against a wall 
to be shot. From Mexico he had escaped to New 
York, hoping to be accepted by the British mili- 
tary authorities. Not unnaturally he had been re- 
jected. The purpose of his voyage to the Old 
Country was to try his luck with the Navy. He 
held his certificate as a highly qualified marine 
engineer. No one could persuade him that he 
was not wanted. *T could last six months," he 
said, "it would be something. Heaps of chaps 
don't last as long." 

This man, a crock in every sense, hurrying back 
to help his country, symbolised for every Amer- 
ican aboard the unconquerable courage of Great 
Britain. If you hadn't the full measure of years 
to give, give what was left, even though it were 
but six months. I may add that in England his 
services were accepted. His persistence refused 
to be disregarded. When red-tape stopped his 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 19 

progress, he used back-stairs strategy. No one 
could bar him from his chance of serving. 

In believing that he represented the Empire at 
its best, my Americans were not mistaken. 
There are thousands fighting to-day who share 
his example. One is an ex-champion sculler of 
Oxford; even in those days he was blind as a 
bat. His subsequent performance is consistent 
with his record ; we always knew that he had 
guts. At the start of the war, he tried to enlist 
and was turned down on the score of eyesight. 
He tried four times with no better result. The 
fifth time he presented himself he was fool-proof; 
he had learnt the eyesight tests by heart. He 
went out a year ago as a "one pip artist" — a sec- 
ond lieutenant. Within ten months he had be- 
come a captain and was acting lieutenant-colonel 
of his battalion, all the other officers having been 
killed or wounded. At Cambrai he did such gal- 
lant work that he was personally congratulated by 
the general of his division. These American 
officers had heard such stories; they regarded 
England with a kind of worship. As men who 
hoped to be brave but were untested, they found 
something mystic and well-nigh incredible in such 
utter courage. The consumptive racing across the 
Atlantic that he might do something for England 



20 OUT TO WIN 

before death took him, made this spirit real to 
them. 

We travelled to London as a party and there 
for a time we held together. The night before 
several set out for France, we had a farewell 
gathering. The consumptive, who had just ob- 
tained his commission, was in particularly high 
feather; he brought with him a friend, a civilian 
official in the Foreign Office. Please picture the 
group : all men who had come from distant parts 
of the world to do one job; men in the army, 
navy, and flying service; every one in uniform ex- 
cept the stranger. 

Talk developed along the line of our absolute 
certainty as to complete and final victory. The 
civilian stranger commenced to raise his voice 
in dissent. We disputed his statements. He then 
set to work to run through the entire argument 
of pessimism : America was too far away to be 
effective; Russia was collapsing; France was ex- 
hausted ; England had reached the zenith of her 
endeavour; Italy was not united in purpose. On 
every front he saw a black cloud rising and took 
a dyspeptic's delight in describing it as a little 
blacker than he saw it. There was an apostolic 
zeal about the man's dreary earnestness. He spoke 
with that air of authority which is not uncommon 
with civilian Government officials. The Amer- 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 21 

icans stared rather than listened ; this was not the 
mystic and utter courage which they had expected 
to find well-nigh incredible. Their own passion 
far out-topped it. 

The argument reached a sudden climax. There 
were wounded officers present. One of them said, 
"You wouldn't speak that way if you had the 
foggiest conception of the kind of chaps we have 
in the trenches." 

"It makes no difference what kind they are," 
the pessimist replied intolerantly. "I'm asking 
you to face facts. Because you've succeeded in 
an attack, you soldiers seem to think that the war 
is ended. You base your arguments all the time 
on your little local knowledge of your own par- 
ticular front." 

The discussion ceased abruptly. Every one 
sprang up. Voices strove together in advising 
this "facer of facts" to get into khaki and to go 
to where he could obtain precisely the same kind 
of little local knowledge — perhaps, a few wounds 
as well. His presence was dishonourable — con- 
taminating. We filed out and left him sitting 
humped in a chair, looking puzzled and pathetic, 
murmuring, "But I thought I was among 
friends." 

My last clear-cut recollection is of a chubby 
young American Naval Airman standing over 



22 OUT TO WIN 

him, with clenched fists, passionately instructing 
him in the spiritual geography of America. 

That's one type of fool; the type who special- 
ises in catastrophe ; the type who in eternally fac- 
ing up to facts, takes no account of that magic 
quality, courage, which can make one man more 
terrible than an army; the type who is so pro- 
foundly well-informed about externals, that he 
ignores the mightiness of soul that can remould 
externals to spiritual purposes. Were I a Ger- 
man, the spectacle of that solitary consumptive 
leaving the climate which meant hfe to him and 
hastening home to give just six months of service 
to his country, would be more menacing than the 
loss of an entire corps frontage. 

And there's the ty^e who can't forget; he suf- 
fers from a fundamental lack of generosity. The 
Englishman of this type can't refrain from quot- 
ing such phrases as, "Too proud to fight," when- 
ever opportunity offers. His American counter- 
part insists that he is not fighting for Great Brit- 
ain, but for the French. He makes himself of- 
fensive by silly talk about sister republics, imply- 
ing that all other forms of Government are es- 
sentially tyrannic. He never loses an opportunity 
to mention Lafayette, assuming that one French 
man is worth ten Britishers. A very gross false- 
hood is frequently on the lips of this sort of man; 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 23 

he doesn't know where he picked it up and has 
never troubled to test its accuracy. I can tell 
him where it originated; at Berlin in the bureau 
for Hun propaganda. Every time he utters it he 
is helping the enemy. This falsehood is to the 
effect that Great Britain has conserved her man- 
power; that in the early days she let Frenchmen 
do the fighting and that now she is marking time 
till Americans are ready to die in her stead. This 
statement is so stupendously untrue that it goes 
unheeded by those who know the empty homes of 
England or have witnessed the gallantry of our 
piled-up dead. 

Then there's the jealous fool — the fool who in 
England will see no reason why this book should 
have been published. His line of argument will 
be, "We've been in this war for more than three 
years. We've done everything that America is 
doing; because she's new to the game, we're doing 
it much better. We don't want any one to appre- 
ciate us, so why go praising her?" Precisely. 
Why be decent ? Why seek out affections ? Why 
be polite or kindly? Why not be automatons? 
I suppose the answer is, "Because we happen to 
be men, and are privileged temporarily to be 
playing in the role of heroes. The heroic spirit 
rather educates one to hold out the hand of 
friendship to new arrivals of the same sort." 



24 OUT TO WIN 

There is one type of fool, exclusively Amer- 
ican, whose stupidity arises from love and tender- 
ness. Very often she is a woman. She has been 
responsible for the arrival in France of a number 
of narrow-minded and well-intentioned persons; 
their errand is to investigate vice-conditions in 
the U. S. Army. This suspicion of the women 
at home concerning the conduct of their men in 
the field, is directly traceable to reports of the de- 
basing influences of war set in circulation by the 
anti-militarists. I want to say emphatically that 
cleaner, more earnest, better protected troops than 
those from the United States are not to be found 
in Europe. Both in Great Britain and on the 
Continent their puritanism has created a deep 
impression. By their idealism they have made 
their power felt; they are men with a vision in 
their eyes, who have travelled three thousand 
miles to keep a rendezvous with death. That 
those for whom they are prepared to die should 
suspect them is a degrading disloyalty. That 
trackers should be sent after them from home to 
pick up clues to their unworthiness is sheerly 
damnable. To disparage the heroism of other 
nations is bad enough; to distrust the heroes of 
your own flesh and blood, attributing to them 
lower than civilian moral standards, is to be 
guilty of the meanest treachery and ingratitude. 



A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 25 

Here, then, are some of the sample fools to 
whom this preface is addressed. The list could 
be indefinitely lengthened. "The fool hath said,- 
in his heart, There is no God'." He says it in 
many ways and takes a long while in saying it; 
but the denying of God is usually the beginning 
and the end of his conversation. He denies the 
vision of God in his fellow-men and fellow-na- 
tions, even when the spikes of the cross are visibly 
tearing wounds in their feet and hands. 

Life has swung back to a primitive decision 
since the war commenced. The decision is the 
same for both men and nations. They can choose 
the world or achieve their own souls. They can 
cast mercenary lots for the raiment of a crucified 
righteousness or take up their martyrdom as 
disciples. Those men and nations who have been 
disciples together can scarcely fail to remain 
friends when the tragedy is ended. What the fool 
says in his heart at this present is not of any 
lasting importance. There will always be those 
who mock, offering vinegar in the hour of agony 
and taunting, "If thou be what thou sayest. ..." 
But in the comradeship of the twilit walk to Em- 
maus neither the fool nor the mocker are re- 
membered. 



OUT TO WIN 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 

The American Troops have set words to one 
of their bugle calls. These words are indicative 
of their spirit — of the calculated determination 
with which they have faced up to their adven- 
ture : an adventure unparalleled for magnitude in 
the history of their nation. 

They fall in in two ranks. They tell off from 
the right in fours. "Move to the right in fours. 
Quick March," comes the order. The bugles strike 
up. The men swing into column formation, 
heads erect and picking up the step. To the 
song of the bugles they chant words as they 
march. "We've got four years to do this job. 
We've got four years to do this job." 

That is the spirit of America. Her soldiers 
give her four years, but to judge from the scale 
of her preparations she might be planning for 
thirty. 

America is out to win. I write this opening 
sentence in Paris where I am temporarily absent 

29 



30 OUT TO WIN 

from my battery, that I may record the story of 
America's efforts in France. My purpose is to 
prove with facts that America is in the war to 
her last dollar, her last man, and for just as long 
as Germany remains unrepentant. Her strength 
is unexpended, her spirit is un-war-weary. She 
has a greater efficient man-power for her popula- 
tion than any nation that has yet entered the arena 
of hostilities. Her resources are continental 
rather than national; it is as though a new and 
undivided Europe had sprung to arms in moral 
horror against Germany. She has this to add 
fierceness to her soul — the reproach that she came 
in too late. That reproach is being wiped out- 
rapidly by the scarlet of self-imposed sacrifice. 
She did come in late — for that very reason she 
will be the last of Germany's adversaries to 
withdraw. 

She did not want to come in at all. Many of 
her hundred million population emigrated to her 
shores out of hatred of militarism and to escape 
from just such a hell as is now raging in Europe. 
At first it seemed a far cry from Flanders to San 
Francisco. Philanthropy could stretch that far, 
but not the risking of human lives. Moreover, 
the American nation is not racially a unit; it is 
bound together by its ideal quest for peaceful and 
democratic institutions. It was a difficult task 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 31 

for any government to convince so remote a 
people that their destiny was being made molten 
in the furnace of the Western Front; when once 
that truth was fully apprehended the diverse souls 
of America leapt up as one soul and declared for 
war. In so doing the people of the United States 
forewent the freedom from fear that they had 
gained by their journey across the Atlantic; they 
turned back in their tracks to smite again with 
renewed strength and redoubled hate the old bru- 
tal Fee-Fo-Fum of despotism, from whose 
clutches they thought they had escaped. 

America's is the case of The Terrible Meek; 
for two and a half years she lulled Germany and 
astonished the Allies by her abnormal patience. 
The most terrifying warriors of history have been 
peace-loving nations hounded into hostility by 
outraged ideals. Certainly no nation was ever 
more peace-loving tlian the American. To the 
boy of the Middle West the fury of kings must 
have read like a fairy-tale. The appeal to armed 
force was a method of compelling righteousness 
which his entire training had taught him to view 
with contempt as obsolete. Yet never has any na- 
tion mobilised its resources more efficiently, on so 
titanic a scale, in so brief a space of time to re- 
establish justice with armed force. The out- 
raged ideal which achieved this miracle was the 



32 OUT TO WIN 

denial by the Hun of the right of every man to 
personal liberty and happiness. 

Few people guessed that America would fling 
her weight so utterly into the winning of the Al- 
lied cause. Those who knew her best thought it 
scarcely possible. Germany, who believed she 
knew her, thought it least of all. German states- 
men argued that America had too much to lose by 
such a decision — too little to gain; the task of 
transporting men and materials across three thou- 
sand miles of ocean seemed insuperable; the dif- 
fering traditions of her population would make it 
impossible for her to concentrate her will in so 
unusual a direction. Basing their arguments on 
a knowledge of the deep-seated selfishness of 
human nature, Hun statesmen were of the fixed 
opinion that no amount of insult would compel 
America to take up the sword. 

Two and a half years before, those same states- 
men made the same mistake with regard to Great 
Britain and her Dominions. The British were a 
race of shop-keepers; no matter how chivalrous 
the call, nothing would persuade them to jeopard- 
ise their money-bags. If they did for once leap 
across their counters to become Sir Galahads, 
then the Dominions would seize that opportunity 
to secure their own base safety and to fling the 
Mother Country out of doors. The British gave 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 33 

these students of selfishness a surprise from which 
their military machine has never recovered, when 
the "Old Contemptibles" held up the advance of 
the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing- 
space. The Dominions gave them a second les- 
son in magnanimity when Canada's lads built a 
wall with their bodies to block the drive at Ypres. 
America refuted them for the third time, when 
she proved her love of world-liberty greater than 
her affection for the dollar, bugling across the 
Atlantic her shrill challenge to mailed bestiality. 
Germany has made the grave mistake of esti- 
mating human nature at its lowest worth as she 
sees it reflected in her own face. In every case, 
in her judgment of the two great Anglo-Saxon 
races, she has been at fault through over-empha- 
sising their capacity for baseness and under-esti- 
mating their capacity to respond to an ideal. It 
was an ideal that led the Pilgrim Fathers westv 
ward; after more than two hundred years it is 
an ideal which pilots their sons home again, rac- 
ing through danger zones in their steel-built grey- 
hounds that they may lay down their lives in 
France. 

In view of the monumental stupidity of her 
diplomacy Germany has found it necessary to in- 
vent explanations. The form these have taken 
as regards America has been the attributing of 



34 OUT TO WIN 

fresh low motives. Her object at first was to 
prove to the world at large how very little 
difference America's participation in hostilities 
would make. When America tacitly negatived 
this theory by the energy with which she raised 
billions and mobilised her industries, Hun propa- 
gandists, by an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad 
the opinion that these mighty preparations were a 
colossal bluff which would redound to Germany's 
advantage. They said that President Wilson had 
bided his time so that his country might strut as 
a belligerent for only the last six months, and so 
obtain a voice in the peace negotiations. He did 
not intend that America should fight, and was 
only getting his armies ready that they might en- 
force peace when the Allies were exhausted and 
already counting on Americans manning their 
trenches. Inasmuch as his country would neither 
have sacrificed nor died, he would be willing to 
give Germany better terms; therefore America's 
apparent joining of the Allies was a camouflage 
which would turn out an advantage to Germany. 
This lie, with variations, has spread beyond the 
Rhine and gained currency in certain of the neu- 
tral nations. 

Four days after President Wilson's declaration 
of war the Canadians captured Vimy Ridge. As 
the Hun prisoners came running like scared rab- 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 35 

bits through the shell-fire, we used to question 
them as to conditions on their side of the line. 
Almost the first question that was asked was, 
"What do you think about the United States?" 
By far the most frequent reply was, "We have 
submarines; the United States will make no dif- 
ference." The answer was so often in the same 
formula that it was evident the men had been 
schooled in the opinion. It was only the rare 
man of education who said, "It is bad— very bad; 
the worst mistake we have made." 

We, in the front-line, were very far from ap- 
preciating America's decision at its full value. For 
a year we had had the upper-hand of the Hun. 
To use the language of the trenches, we knew 
that we could go across No Man's Land and "beat 
him up" any time we liked. To tell the truth, 
many of us felt a little jealous that when, after 
two years of punishment, we had at last become 
top-dog, we should be called upon to share the 
glory of victory with soldiers of the eleventh 
hour. We believed that we were entirely cap- 
able of finishing the job without further aid. My 
own feeling, as an Englishman living in New 
York, was merely one of relief — that now, when 
war was ended, I should be able to return to 
friends of whom I need not be ashamed. To what 
extent America's earnestness has changed that 



36 OUT TO WIN 

sentiment is shown by the expressed desire of 
every Canadian, that if Americans are anywhere 
on the Western Front, they ought to be next to 
us in the hne. "They are of our blood," we say; 
"they will carry on our record." Only those who 
have had the honour to serve with tlie Canadian 
Corps and know its dogged adhesion to heroic 
traditions, can estimate the value of this compli- 
ment, 

I should say that in the eyes of the combatant, 
after President Wilson, Mr. Ford has done more 
than any other one man to interpret the spirit 
of his nation; our altered attitude towards him 
typifies our altered attitude towards America. 
Mr. Ford, the impassioned pacifist, sailing to Eu- 
rope in his ark of peace, staggered our amaze- 
ment. Mr. Ford, still the impassioned pacifist, 
whose aeroplane engines will help to bomb the 
Hun's conscience into wakefulness, staggers our 
amazement but commands our admiration. We do 
not attempt to understand or reconcile his two ex- 
tremes of conduct, but as fighters we appreciate 
the courage of soul that made him "about turn" 
to search for his ideal in a painful direction when 
the old friendly direction had failed. Here again it 
is significant that bodi with regard to individuals 
and nations, Germany's sternest foes are war- 
haters — war-haters to such an extent that their 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 37 

principles at times have almost shipwrecked their 
careers. In England our example is Lloyd George. 
Throughout the Anglo-Saxon world the slumber- 
ing spirit of Cromwell's Ironsides has sprung to 
life, reminding the British Empire and the United 
States of their common ancestry. After a hun- 
dred and forty years of drifting apart, we stand 
side by side like our forefathers, the fighting 
pacifists at Naseby; like them, having failed to 
make men good with words, we will hew them 
into virtue with the sword. 

At the end of June I went back to Blighty 
wounded. One of my most vivid recollections 
of the time that followed is an early morning in 
July; it must have been among the first of the 
days that I was allowed out of hospital. London 
was green and leafy. The tracks of the tram- 
ways shone like silver in the sunlight. There 
was a spirit of release and immense good humour 
abroad. My course followed the river on the 
south side, all a-dance with wind and little waves. 
As I crossed the bridge at Westminster I became 
aware of an atmosphere of expectation. Sub- 
consciously I must have been noticing it for some 
time. Along Whitehall the pavements were lined 
with people, craning their necks, joking and jos- 
tling, each trying to better his place. Trafalgar 
Square was jammed with a dense mass of hu- 



38 OUT TO WIN 

manity, through which mounted poHce pushed 
their way solemnly, like beadles in a vast un- 
roofed cathedral. Then for the first time I no- 
ticed what I ought to have noticed long before, 
that the Stars and Stripes were exceptionally 
prevalent. Upon inquiry I was informed that 
this was the day on which the first of the Amer- 
ican troops were to march. I picked up with a 
young officer of the Dublin Fusiliers and together 
we forced our way down Pall Mall to the office of 
The Cecil Rhodes Oxford Scholars' Foundation. 
From here we could watch the line of march from 
Trafalgar Square to Marlborough House. While 
we waited, I scanned the group-photographs on 
the walls, some of which contained portraits of 
German Rhodes Scholars with whom I had been 
acquainted I remembered how they had always 
spent their vacations in England, assiduously 
bicycling to the most unexpected places. In the 
light of later developments I thought I knew the 
reason. 

Suddenly, far away bands struck up. We 
thronged the windows, leaning out that we might 
miss nothing. Through the half mile of people 
that stretched between us and the music a shud- 
der of excitement was running. Then came cheers 
— the deep-throated babel of men's voices and the 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 39 

shrill staccato of women's. "They're coming," 
some one cried ; then I saw them. 

I forget which regiment lead. The Coldstreams 
were there, the Scotch and Welsh Guards, the 
Irish Guards with their saffron kilts and green 
ribbons floating from their bag-pipes. A British 
regimental band marched ahead of each American 
regiment to do it honour. Down the sunlit can- 
yon of Pall Mall they swung to the tremendous 
cheering of the crowd. Quite respectable citizens 
had climbed lamj>-posts and railings, and were 
waving their hats. I caught the words that were 
being shouted, "Are we downhearted?" Then, in 
a fierce roar of denial, "No !" It was a wonder- 
ful ovation — far more wonderful than might have 
been expected from a people who had grown ac- 
customed to the sight of troops during the last 
three years. The genuineness of the welcome was 
patent; it was the voice of England that was 
thundering along the pavements. 

I was anxious to see the quality of the men 
which America had sent. They drew near; then 
I saw them plainly. They were fine strapping 
chaps, broad of shoulder and proudly independ- 
ent. They were not soldiers yet ; they were civil- 
ians who had been rushed into khaki. Their 
equipment was of every kind and sort and spoke 
eloquently of the hurry in which they had been 



40 OUT TO WIN 

brought together. That meant much to us in 
London — much more than if they had paraded 
with all the "spit and pohsh" of the crack troops 
who led them. It meant to us that America was 
doing her bit at the earHest date possible. 

The other day, here in France, I met an officer 
of one of those battahons; he told me the Amer- 
icans' side of the story. They were expert rail- 
road troops, picked out of civihan life and packed 
off to England without any pretence at military 
training. When they were informed that they 
were to be the leading feature in a London pro- 
cession, many of them even lacked uniforms. 
With true American democracy of spirit, the offi- 
cers stripped their rank-badges from their spare 
tunics and lent them to the privates, who other- 
wise could not have marched. 

"I'm satisfied," my friend said, "that there 
were Londoners so doggone hoarse that night that 
they couldn't so much as whisper." 

What impressed the men most of all was the 
King's friendly greeting of them at Buckingham 
Palace. There were few of them who had ever 
seen a king before. "Friendly — that's the word! 
From the King downwards they were all so 
friendly. It was more like a family party than a 
procession; and on the return journey, when we 
marched at ease, old ladies broke up our forma- 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 41 

tions to kiss us. Nice and grandmotherly of them 
we thought." 

This, as I say, I learnt later in France; at the 
time I only knew that the advance-guard of mil- 
lions was marching. As I watched them my eyes 
grew misty. Troops who have already fought 
no longer stir me; they have exchanged their 
dreams of glory for the reality of sacrifice — they 
know to what they may look forward. But un- 
tried troops have yet to be disillusioned; dreams 
of the pomp of war are still in their eyes. They 
have not yet owned that they are merely going 
out to die obscurely. 

That day made history. It was then that Eng- 
land first vividly realised that America was actu- 
ally standing shoulder to shoulder at her side. In 
making history it obliterated almost a century 
and a half of misunderstanding. I believe I am 
correct in saying that the last foreign troops to 
march through London were the Hessians, who 
fought against America in the Revolution, and 
that never before had foreign volunteers marched 
through England save as conquerors. 

On my recovery I was sent home on sick leave 
and spent a month in New York. No one who 
has not been there since America joined the Al- 
lies can at all reaHse the change that has taken 
place. It is a change of soul, which no statistics 



42 OUT TO WIN 

of armaments can photograph. America has come 
into the war not only with her factories, her bil- 
Hons and her man-power, but with her heart shin- 
ing in her eyes. All her spread-eagleism is gone. 
All her aggressive industrial ruthlessness has van- 
ished. With these has been lost her youthful 
contempt for older civilisations, whom she was 
apt to regard as decaying because they sent her 
emigrants. She has exchanged her prejudices for 
admiration and her grievances for kindness. Her 
"Hats off" attitude to France, England, Belgium 
and to every nation that has shed blood for the 
cause which now is hers, was a thing which I had 
scarcely expected; it was amazing. As an ex- 
ample of how this attitude is being interpreted 
into action, school-histories throughout the United 
States are being re-written, so that American chil- 
dren of the future may be trained in friendship 
for Great Britain, whereas formerly stress was 
laid on the hostilities of the eighteenth century 
which produced the separation. As a further 
example, many American boys, who for various 
reasons were not accepted by the military author- 
ities in their own country, have gone up to Can- 
ada to join. 

One such case is typical. Directly it became 
evident that America was going into the war, one 
boy, with whom I am acquainted, made up his 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 43 

mind to be prepared to join. He persuaded his 
father to allow him to go to a Flying School to 
train as a pilot. Having obtained his certificate, 
he presented himself for enlistment and was 
turned down on the ground that he was lacking in 
a sense of equipoise. Being too young for any 
other branch of the service, he persuaded his fam- 
ily to allow him to try his luck in Canada. Some- 
how, by hook or by crook, he had to get into the 
war. The Royal Flying Corps accepted him with 
the proviso that he must take out his British nat- 
uralisation papers. This changing of nationahty 
was a most bitter pill for his family to swallow. 
The boy had done his best to be a soldier ; he was 
the eldest son, and there they would willingly 
have had the matter rest. Moreover they could 
compel the matter to rest there, for, being under 
age, he could not change his nationality without 
his father's consent. It was his last desperate 
argument that turned the decision in his favour, 
*Tf it's a choice between my honour and my coun- 
try, I choose my honour every time." So now 
he's a Britisher, learning "spit and polish" and 
expecting to bring down a Hun almost any day. 
One noticed in almost the smallest details how 
deeply America had committed her conscience to 
her new undertaking. While in England we 
grumble about a food-control which is absolutely 



44 OUT TO WIN 

necessary to our preservation, America is volun- 
tarily restricting herself not for her own sake, 
but for the sake of the Allies. They say that they 
are being "Hooverized," thus coining a new word 
out of Mr. Hoover's name. Sometimes these 
Hooverish practices produce contrasts which are 
rather quaint. I went to stay with a friend who 
had just completed as his home an exact repro- 
duction of a palace in Florence. Whoever went 
short, there was little that he could not afford. 
At our meals I noticed that I was the only person 
who was served with butter and sugar, and en- 
quired why. "It's all right for you," I was told; 
"you're a soldier; but if we eat butter and sugar, 
some of the Allies who really need them will have 
to go short." A small illustration, but one that is 
typical of a national, sacrificial, underlying 
thought. 

Later I met with many instances of the various 
forms in which this thought is taking shape, I 
was in America when the Liberty War Loan was 
so amazingly over-subscribed. I saw buses, their 
roofs crowded with bands and orators, doing the 
tour of street-corners. Every store of any size, 
every railroad, every bank and financial corpora- 
tion had set for its employes and customers the 
ideal sum which it considered that they personally 
ought to subscribe. This ideal sum was recorded 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 45 

on the face of a clock, hung outside the building. 
As the gross amount actually collected increased, 
the hands were seen to revolve. Everything that 
eloquence and ingenuity could devise was done to 
gather funds for the war. Big advertisers 
made a gift of their newspaper space to the na- 
tion. There were certain public-spirited men who 
took up blocks of war-bonds, making the request 
that no interest should be paid. You went to a 
theatre; during the interval actors and actresses 
sold war-certificates, harangued the audience and 
set the example by their own purchases. 

When the Liberty War Loan had been raised, 
the Red Cross started its great national drive, ap- 
portioning the necessary grand total among all 
the cities from sea-board to sea-board, according 
to their wealth and population. 

One heard endless stories of the variety of ef- 
forts being made. America had committed her 
heart to the Allies witli an abandon which it is 
difficult to describe. Young society girls, who had 
been brought up in luxury and protected from 
ugliness all their lives, were banding themselves 
into units, supplying the money, hiring the ex- 
perts, and coming over themselves to France to 
look after refugees' babies. Others were plan- 
ning to do reconstruction work in the devastated 
districts immediately behind the battle-line. I 



46 OUT TO WIN 

met a number of these enthusiasts before they 
sailed ; I have since seen them at work in France, 
What struck me at the time was their rose-leaf 
frailness and utter unsuitability for the task. I 
could guess the romantic visions which tinted their 
souls to the colour of sacrifice; I also knew what 
refugees and devastated districts look like. I 
feared that the discrepancy between the dream 
and the reality would doom them to disillusion. 

During the month that I was in America I vis- 
ited several of the camps. The first draft army 
had been called. The first call gave the country 
seven million men from which to select. I was 
surprised to jfind that in many camps, before mili- 
tary training could commence, schools in English 
had to be started to ensure the men's proper un- 
derstanding of commands. This threw a new 
light on the difficulties Mr. Wilson had had to 
face in coming into the war. 

The men of the draft army represent as many 
nationalities, dialects and race-prejudices as there 
are in Europe. They are a Europe expatriated. 
During their residence in America a great many 
of them have lived in communities where their 
own language is spoken, and their own customs 
are maintained. Frequently they have their own 
newspapers, which foster their national exclusive- 
ness, and reflect the hatreds and affections of the 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 47 

country from which they emigrated. These con- 
ditions set up a barrier between them and cur- 
rent American opinion which it was difficult for 
the authorities at Washington to cross. The 
people who represented neutral European nations 
naturally were anxious for the neutrality of 
America. The people who represented the Cen- 
tral Powers naturally were against America sid- 
ing with the Allies. The only way of re-directing 
their sympathies was by means of education and 
propaganda; this took time, especially when they 
were separated from the truth by the stumbling 
block of language. For three years they had to be 
persuaded that they were no longer Poles, 
Swedes, Germans, Finns, Norwegians, but first 
and last Americans. I mention this here, in con- 
nection with the teaching of the draft army Eng- 
lish, because it affords one of the most vivid and 
comprehensible reasons for America's long delay. 
What brought America into the war? I have 
often been asked the question; in answering it I 
always feel that I am giving only a partial an- 
swer. On the one hand there is the record of her 
two and a half years of procrastination, on the 
other the titanic upspringing of her warrior- 
spirit, which happened almost in a day. How 
can one reconcile the multitudinous pacific notes 
which issued from Washington with the bugle- 



48 OUT TO WIN 

song to which the American boys march : "We've 
got four years to do this job." The cleavage be- 
tween the two attitudes is too sharp for the com- 
prehension of other nations. 

The first answer which I shall give is entirely 
sane and will be accepted by the rankest cynic. 
America came into the war at the moment she 
realised that her own national life was endan- 
gered. Her leaders realised this months before 
her masses could be persuaded. The political 
machinery of the United States is such that no 
Government would dare to commence hostilities 
unless it was assured that its decision was the 
decision of the entire nation. That the Govern- 
ment might have this assurance, Mr. Wilson had 
to maintain peace long after the intellect of Amer- 
ica had declared for war, while he educated the 
cosmopolitan citizenship of his country into a 
knowledge of Hun designs. The result was that 
he created the appearance of having been pushed 
into hostilities by the weight of public opinion. 

For many months the Secret Service agents of 
the States, aided by the agents of other nations, 
were unravelling German plots and collecting data 
of treachery so irrefutable that it had to be ac- 
cepted. When all was ready the first chapters of 
the story were divulged. They were divulged al- 
most in the form of a serial novel, so that the man 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 49 

who read his paper to-day and said, "No doubt 
that isolated item is true, but it doesn't incriminate 
the entire German nation," next day on opening 
his paper, found further proof and was forced to 
retreat to more ingenious excuses. One day he 
was informed of Germany's abuse of neutral em- 
bassies and mail-bags; the next of the submarine 
bases in Mexico, prepared as a threat against 
American shipping; the day after that the whole 
infamous story of how Berlin had financed the 
Mexican Revolution. Germany's efforts to pro- 
voke an American-Japanese war leaked out, her 
attempts to spread disloyalty among German- 
Americans, her conspiracies for setting fire to fac- 
tories and powder-plants, including the blowing 
up of bridges and the Welland Canal. Quietly, 
circumstantially, without rancour, the details 
were published of the criminal spider-web woven 
by the Dernburgs, Bernstorffs and Von Papens, 
accredited creatures of the Kaiser, who with Ma- 
chiavellian smiles had professed friendship for 
those whom their hands itched to slay and stran- 
gle. Gradually the camouflage of bovine genial- 
ity was lifted from the face of Germany and the 
dripping fangs of the Blonde Beast were displayed 
— the Minotaur countenance of one glutted with 
human flesh, weary with rape and rapine, but still 



so OUT TO WIN 

tragically insatiable and lusting for the new sen- 
sation of hounding America to destruction, 

I have not placed these revelations in their 
proper sequence; some were made after war had 
been declared. They had the effect of changing 
every decent American into a self-appointed de- 
tective. The weight of evidence put Germany's 
perfidy beyond dispute; clues to new and endless 
chains of machinations were discovered daily. 
The Hun had come as a guest into America's 
house with only one intent — to do murder as soon 
as the lights were out. 

The anger which these disclosures produced 
knew no bounds. Hun apologists — the type of 
men who invariably believe that there is a good 
deal to be said on both sides — quickly faded into 
patriots. There had been those who had cried 
out for America's intervention from the first day 
that Belgium's neutrality had been violated. Many 
of these, losing patience, had either enlisted in 
Canada or were already in France on some er- 
rand of mercy. Their cry had reached Washing- 
ton at first only as a whisper, very faint and dis- 
tant. Little by little that cry had swelled, till it 
became the nation's voice, angry, insistent, not to 
be disregarded. The most convinced humani- 
tarian, together with the sincerest admirer of the 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 51 

old-fashioned kindly Hans, had to join in that 
cry or brand himself a traitor by his silence. 

America came into the war, as every country 
came, because her life was threatened. She is not 
fighting for France, Great Britain, Belgium, Ser- 
bia; she is fighting to save herself. I am glad to 
make this point because I have heard camouflaged 
Pro-Germans and thoughtless mischief-makers 
discriminating between the Allies. "We are not 
fighting for Great Britain," they say, "but for 
plucky France." When I was in New York 
last October a firm stand was being made against 
these discriminators; some of them even found 
themselves in the hands of the Secret Service 
men. The feeling was growing that not to be 
Pro-British was not to be Pro-Ally, and that not 
to be Pro-Ally was to be anti-American. This 
talk of fighting for somebody else is all lofty 
twaddle. America is fighting for America. While 
the statement is perfectly true, Americans have a 
right to resent it. 

In September, 19 14, I crossed to Holland and 
was immensely disgusted at the interpretation of 
Great Britain's action which I found current 
there. I had supposed that Holland would be 
full of admiration ; I found that she was nothing 
of the sort. We Britishers, in those early days, 
believed that we were magnanimous big brothers 



52 OUT TO WIN 

who could have kept out of the bloodshed, but 
preferred to die rather than see the smaller na- 
tions bullied. Men certainly did not join Kit- 
chener's mob because they believed that Eng- 
land's life was threatened. I don't believe that 
any strong emotion of patriotism animated Can- 
ada in her early efforts. The individual Briton 
donned the khaki because he was determined to 
see fair play, and was damned if he would stand 
by a spectator while women and children were 
being butchered in Belgium. He felt that he had 
to do something to stop it. If he didn't, the same 
thing would happen in Holland, then in Denmark, 
then in Norway. There was no end to it. When 
a mad dog starts running the best thing to do is 
to shoot it. 

But the Hollanders didn't agree with me at all. 
"You're fighting for yourselves," they said. 
You're not fighting to save us from being in- 
vaded; you're not fighting to prevent the Hun 
from conquering France; you're not fighting to 
liberate Belgium. You're fighting because you 
know that if you let France be crushed, it will 
be your turn next." 

Quite true — and absolutely unjust. The Hol- 
lander, whose households we were guarding, chose 
to interpret our motive at its most ignoble worth. 
Our men were receiving in their bodies the 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 53 

wounds which would have been inflicted on Hol- 
land, had we elected to stand out. In the light of 
subsequent events, all the world acknowledges 
that we were and are fighting for our own house- 
holds; but it is a glorious certainty that scarcely 
a Britisher who died in those early days had the 
least realisation of the fact. It was the chivalrous 
vision of a generous Crusade that led our chaps 
from their firesides to the trampled horror that 
is Flanders. They said farewell to their habitual 
affections, and went out singing to their marriage 
with death. 

I suppose there has been no war that could not 
be interpreted ultimately as a war of self-interest. 
The statesmen who make wars always carefully 
reckon the probabilities of loss or gain; but the 
lads who kiss their sweethearts good-bye require 
reasons more vital than those of pounds, shillings 
and pence. Few men lay down their lives from self- 
interested motives. Courage is a spiritual qual- 
ity which requires a spiritual inducement. Men 
do not set a price on their chance of being blown 
to bits by shells. Even patriotism is too vague 
to be a sufficient incentive. The justice of the 
cause to be fought for helps; it must be propor- 
tionate to the magnitude of the sacrifice de- 
manded. But always an ideal is necessary — an 
ideal of liberty, indignation and mercy. If this 



54 OUT TO WIN 

is true of the men who go out to die, it is even 
more true of the women who send them, 

"Where there're no children left to pull 
The few scared, ragged flowers — 
All that was ours, and, God, how beautifull 
All, all that was once ours, 
Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire, 
So lost to all sweet semblance of desire 
That we, in those fields seeking desperately 
One face long-lost to love, one face that lies 
Only upon the breast of Memory, 
Would never find it — even the very blood 
Is stamped into the horror of the mud — 
Something that mad men trample under-foot 
In the narrow trench — for these things are not men — 
Things shapeless, sodden, mute 
Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns ; 
Those things that loved us once . . . 
Those that were ours, but never ours again." 

For two and a half years the American press 
specialized on the terror-aspect of the European 
hell. Every sensational, exceptional fact was not 
only chronicled, but widely circulated. The 
bodily and mental havoc that can be wrought by 
shell-fire was exaggerated out of all proportion 
to reality. Photographs, almost criminal in type, 
were published to illustrate the brutal expression 
of men who had taken part in bayonet charges. 
Lies were spread broadcast by supposedly repu- 
table persons, stating how soldiers had to be mad- 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 55 

dened with drugs or alcohol before they would go 
over the top. Much of what was recorded was 
calculated to stagger the imagination and intimi- 
date the heart. The reason for this was that the 
supposed eye-witnesses rarely saw what they 
recorded. They had usually never been within 
ten miles of the front, for only combatants are al- 
lowed in the line. They brought civilian minds, 
undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to their 
task ; they never for one instant guessed the truly 
spiritual exaltation which gives wings to the soul 
of the man who fights in a just cause. Squalor, 
depravity, brutalisation, death — moral, mental 
and physical deformity were the rewards which 
the American public learned the fighting-man 
gained in the trenches. They heard very little 
of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sac- 
rifice, the gallant self-efifacement which having 
honour for a companion taught. And yet, despite 
this frantic portrayal of terror, America decided 
for war. Her National Guard and Volunteers 
rolled up in millions, clamouring to cross the three 
thousand miles of water that they might place 
their lives in jeopardy. They were no more 
urged by motives of self-interest than were the 
men who enlisted in Kitchener's mob. It wasn't 
the threat to their national security that brought 
them ; it was the lure of an ideal — the fine white 



56 OUT TO WIN 

knightliness of men whose compassion had been 
tormented and whose manhood had been chal- 
lenged. When one says that America came into 
the war to save herself it is only true of her states- 
men; it is no more true of her masses than it 
was true of the masses of Great Britain. 

So far, in my explanation as to why America 
came into the war, I have been scarcely more 
generous in the attributing of magnanimous mo- 
tives than my Hollander. To all intents and pur- 
poses I have said, "America is fighting because 
she knows that if the Allies are over-weakened or 
crushed, it will be her turn next." In discussing 
the matter with me, one of our Generals said, "I 
really don't see that it matters a tuppenny cuss 
why she's fighting, so long as she helps us to lick 
the Hun and does it quickly." But it does matter. 
The reasons for her having taken up arms make 
all the difference to our respect for her. Here, 
then, are the reasons which I attribute: enthusi- 
asm for the ideals of the Allies; admiration for 
the persistency of their heroism; compassionate 
determination to borrow some of the wounds 
which otherwise would be inflicted upon nations 
which have already suffered. A small band of 
pioneers In mercy are directly responsible for this 
change of attitude in two and a half years from 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 57 

opportunistic neutrality to a reckless welcoming 
of martyrdom. 

At the opening of hostilities in 1914, America 
divided herself into two camps — the Pro- Allies 
and the others. "The others" consisted of people 
of all shades of opinion and conviction: the anti- 
British, anti-French, the pro-German, the anti- 
war and the merely neutral, some of whom set 
feverishly to work to make a tradesman's advan- 
tage out of Europe's misfortune. A great traf- 
fic sprang up in the manufacture of war mate- 
rials. Almost all of these went to the Allies, ow- 
ing to the fact that Britain controlled the seas. 
Whether they would not have been sold just as 
readily to Germany, had that been possible, is a 
matter open to question. In any case, the camp 
of "The Others" was overwhelmingly in the ma- 
jority. 

One by one, and in little protesting bands, the 
friends of the Allies slipped overseas bound on 
self-imposed, sacrificial quests. They went like 
knight-errants to the rescue; while others suf- 
fered, their own ease was intolerable. The wo- 
men, whom they left, formed themselves into 
groups for the manufacture of the munitions of 
mercy. There were men like Alan Seeger, who 
chanced to be in Europe when war broke out; 
many of these joined up with the nearest fighting 



58 OUT TO WIN 

units. *T have a rendezvous with death," were 
Alan Seeger's last words as he fell mortally 
wounded between the French and German 
trenches. His voice was the voice of thousands 
who had pledged themselves to keep that rendez- 
vous in the company of Britishers, Belgians and 
Frenchmen, long before their country had dreamt 
of committing herself. Some of these friends 
of the Allies chose the Ford Ambulance, others 
positions in the Commission for the Relief of 
Belgium, and yet others the more forceful sym- 
pathy of the bayonet as a means of expressing 
their wrath. Soon, through the heart of France, 
with the tri-colour and the Stars and Stripes fly- 
ing at either end, "le train Americaine" was seen 
hurrying, carrying its scarlet burden. This sight 
could hardly be called neutral unless a similar 
sight could be seen in Germany. It could not. 
The Commission for the Relief of Belgium was 
actually anything but neutral; to minister to the 
results of brutality is tacitly to condemn. 

At Neuilly-sur-Seine the American Ambulance 
Hospital sprang up. It undertook the most griev- 
ous cases, making a specialty of facial mutilations. 
American girls performed the nursing of these 
pitiful human wrecks. Increasingly the crusader- 
spirit was finding a gallant response in the hearts 
of America's girlhood. By the time that President 



"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 59 

Wilson flung his challenge, eighty-six war-relief 
organizations were operating in France. In very 
many cases these organizations only represented a 
hundredth part of the actual personnel working; 
the other ninety-nine hundredths were in the 
States, rolling bandages, shredding oakum, slitting 
linen, making dressings. Long before April, 
1 91 7, American college boys had won a name by 
their devotion in forcing their ambulances over 
shell-torn roads on every part of the French 
Front, but, perhaps, with peculiar heroism at Ver- 
dun. Already the American Flying Squadron has 
earned a veteran's reputation for its daring. The 
report of the sacrificial courage of these pioneers 
had travelled to every State in the Union; their 
example had stirred, shamed and educated the na- 
tion. It is to these knight-errants — very many of 
them boys and girls in years — to the Mrs. Whar- 
tons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the 
Thaws that I attribute America's eager acceptance 
of Calvary, when at last it was offered to her by 
her Statesmen. From an anguished horror to be 
repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in 
whose heart lay hidden the treasure-trove of na- 
tional honour. 

The individual American soldier is inspired by 
just as altruistic motives as his brother-Britisher. 
Compassion, indignation, love of justice, the de- 



6o OUT TO WIN 

termination to see right conquer are his incen- 
tives. You can make a man a conscript, drill 
him, dress him in uniform, but you cannot force 
him to face up to four years to do his job unless 
the ideals were there beforehand. I have seen 
American troop-ships come into the dock with 
ten thousand men singing, 

"Good-bye, Liza, 
I'm going to smash the Kaiser." 

I have been present when packed audiences 
have gone mad in reiterating the American 
equivalent for Tippcrary, with its brave promise, 

"We'll be over, 
We're coming over, 
And we won't be back till it's over, over there." 

But nothing I have heard so well expresses the 
cold anger of the American fighting-man as these 
words which they chant to their bugle-march, 
"We've got four years to do this job." 



n 

WAR AS A JOB 

I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch 
three separate nations facing up to the splendour 
of Armageddon — England, France, America. 
The spirit of each was different. 

I arrived in England from abroad the week 
after war had been declared. There was a new 
vitality in the air, a suppressed excitement, a 
spirit of youth and — it sounds ridiculous — of op- 
portunity. The England I had left had been 
wont to go about with a puckered forehead; she 
was a victim of self-disparagement. She was 
like a mother who had borne too many children 
and was at her wits' end to know how to feed or 
manage them. They were getting beyond her 
control. Since the Boer War there had been a 
growing tendency in the Press to under-rate all 
English effort and to over-praise to England's 
discredit the superior pushfulness of other na- 
tions. This melancholy nagging which had for 
its constant text, "Wake up, John Bull," had pro- 

6i 



62 OUT TO WIN 

duced the hallucination that there was something 
vitally the matter with the Mother Country. No 
one seemed to have diagnosed her complaint, but 
those of us who grew weary of being told that we 
were behind the times, took prolonged trips to 
more cheery quarters of the globe. It is the 
Englishman's privilege to run himself down; he 
usually does it with his tongue in his cheek. But 
for the ten years preceding the outbreak of hos- 
tilities, the prophets of Fleet Street certainly car- 
ried their privilege beyond a joke. Pessimism 
was no longer an amusing pose ; it was becoming 
a habit. 

One week of the iron tonic of war had changed 
all that. The atmosphere was as different as the 
lowlands from the Alps; it was an atmosphere of 
devil-may-care assurance and adventurous man- 
hood. Every one had the summer look of a boat- 
race crowd when the Leander is to be pulled off 
at Henley. In comparing the new England with 
the old, I should have said that every one now had 
the comfortable certainty that he was wanted — 
that he had a future and something to live for. 
But it wasn't the something to live for that ac- 
counted for this gay alertness; it was the sure 
foreknowledge of each least important man that 
he had something worth dying for at last. 

A strange and magnificent way of answering 



WAR AS A JOB 63 

misfortune's challenge — an Elizabethan way, the 
knack of which we believed we had lost! "Busi- 
ness as usual" was written across our doorways. 
It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night 
the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and 
stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for 
fear they should break our hearts by their going. 
Death may be regarded as a funeral or as a 
Columbus expedition to worlds unknown — it may 
be seized upon as an opportunity for weeping or 
for a display of courage. From the first day in 
her choice England never hesitated; like a boy 
set free from school, she dashed out to meet her 
danger with laughter. Her high spirits have 
never failed her. Her cavalry charge with hunt- 
ing-calls upon their lips. Her Tommies go over 
the top humming music-hall ditties. The Hun is 
still "jolly old Fritz." The slaughter is still "a 
nice little war." Death is still "the early door." 
The mud-soaked "old Bills" of the trenches, 
cheerfully ignoring vermin, rain and shell fire, 
continue to wind up their epistles with, "Hoping 
this finds you in the pink, as it leaves me at 
present." They are always in the pink for epis- 
tolary purposes, whatever the strafing or the 
weather. That's England; at all costs, she has 
to be a sportsman. I wonder she doesn't write on 
the crosses above her dead, "Yours in the pink: 



64 OUT TO WIN 

a British soldier, killed in action." England is in 
the pink for the duration of the war. 

The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I 
don't blame him. Our high spirits impress him as 
untimely and indecent. War for him is not a 
sport. How could it be, with his homesteads 
ravaged, his cities flattened, his women violated, 
his populations prisoners in occupied territories? 
For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces 
with a fierce gladness. His spirit is well illus- 
trated by an incident that happened the other day 
in Paris. A descendant of Racine, a well-known 
figure at the opera, was travelling in the Metro 
when he spotted a poilu with a string of ten med- 
als on his breast. The old aristocrat went over to 
the soldier and apologised for speaking to him. 
"But," he said, "I have never seen any poilu with 
so many decorations. You must be of the very 
bravest." 

"That is nothing," the man replied sombrely; 
"before they kill me I shall have won many more. 
This I earned in revenge for my wife, who was 
brutally murdered. And this and this and this for 
my daughters who were ravished. And these 
others — they are for my sons who are now no 
more," 

"My friend, if you will let me, I should like 
to embrace you." And there, in the sight of all 



WAR AS A JOB 65 

the passengers, the old habitue of the opera and 
the common soldier kissed each other. The one 
satisfaction that the French blind have is in 
counting the number of Boche they have slaugh- 
tered. "In that raid ten of us killed fifty," one 
will say; "the memory makes me very happy." 

Curiously enough the outrage that makes the 
Frenchman most revengeful is not the murder 
of his family or the defilement of his women, but 
the wilful killing of his land and orchards. The 
land gave birth to all his flesh and blood; when 
his farm is laid waste wilfully, it is as though the 
mother of all his generations was violated. This 
accounts for the indomitable way in which the 
peasants insist on staying on in their houses under 
shell-fire, refusing to depart till they are forcibly 
turned out. 

We in England, still less in America, have 
never approached the loathing which is felt for 
the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter his 
name, as though the very word was foul in the 
mouth. 

In the face of all that they have suffered, I do 
not wonder that the French misunderstand the 
easy good-humour with which we English go out 
to die. In their eyes and with the continual throb- 
bing of their woimds, this war is an occasion for 
neither good-humour nor sportsmanship, but for 



66 OUT TO WIN 

the wrath of a Hebrew Jehovah, which only 
blows can appease or make articulate. If every 
weapon were taken from their hands and all their 
young men were dead, with naked fists those who 
were left would smite — smite and smite. It is 
fitting that they should feel this way, seeing them- 
selves as they do perpetually frescoed against 
the sky-line of sacrifice; but I am glad that our 
English boys can laugh while they die. 

In trying to explain the change I found in 
England after war had commenced, I mentioned 
Henley and the boat-race crowds. I don't think it 
was a change; it was only a bringing to the surface 
of something that had been there always. Some 
years ago I was at Henley when the Belgians car- 
ried oflf the Leander Cup from the most crack 
crew that England could bring together. Eve- 
ning after evening through the Regatta week the 
fear had been growing that we should lose, yet 
none of that fear was reflected in our attitude 
towards our Belgian guests. Each evening as 
they came up the last stretch of river, leading by 
lengths and knocking another contestant out, the 
spectators cheered them madly. Their method of 
rowing smashed all our traditions; it wasn't cor- 
rect form ; it wasn't anything. It ought to have 
made one angry. But these chaps were game; 
they were winning. "Let's play fair," said the 



WAR AS A JOB 67 

river; so they cheered them. On the last night 
when they beat Leander, looking fresh as paint, 
leading by a length and taking the championship 
out of England, you would never have guessed 
by the flicker of an eyelash that it wasn't the most 
happy conclusion of a good week's sport for every 
oarsman present. 

It's the same spirit essentially that England is 
showing to-day. She cheers the winner. She 
trusts in her strength for another day. She in- 
sists on playing fair. She considers it bad man- 
ners to lose one's temper. She despises to hate 
back. She has carried this spirit so far that if 
you enter the college chapels of Oxford to-day, 
you will find inscribed on memorial tablets to 
the fallen not only the names of Britishers, but 
also the names of German Rhodes Scholars, who 
died fighting for their country against the men 
who were once their friends. Generosity, jus- 
tice, disdain of animosity — these virtues were 
learnt on the playing-fields and race-courses. 
England knows their value; she treats war as a 
sport because so she will fight better. For her 
that approach to adversity is normal. 

With us war is a sport. With the French it is 
a martyrdom. But with the Americans it is a 
job. "We've got four years to do this job. We've 
got four years to do this job," as the American 



68 OUT TO WIN 

soldiers chant. I think in these three attitudes 
towards war as a martyrdom, as sport and as a 
job, you get reflected the three gradations of dis- 
tance by which each nation is divided from the 
trenches. France had her tribulation thrust upon 
her. She was attacked ; she had no option. Eng- 
land, separated by the Channel, could have re- 
strained the weight of her strength, biding her 
time. She had her moment of choice, but rushed 
to the rescue the moment the first Hun bayonet 
gleamed across the Belgian threshold. America, 
fortified by the Atlantic, could not believe that her 
peace was in any way assailed. The idea seemed 
too madly far-fetched. At first she refused to 
realise that this apportioning of a continent three 
thousand miles distant from Germany was any- 
thing but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their do- 
tage. It was inconceivable that it could be the 
practical and achievable cunning of military bul- 
lies and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly 
for her to display any vivid burst of anger. "It 
isn't true," she said. And then, "It seems in- 
credible." And lastly, "What infernal imperti- 
nence !" 

It was the infernal impertinence of Germany's 
schemes for transatlantic plunder that roused the 
average American. It awoke in him a terrible, 
calm anger — a feeling that some one must be pun- 



WAR AS A JOB 69 

ished. It was as though he broke off suddenly in 
what he was doing and commenced rolHng up his 
shirt-sleeves. There was a grim, surprised deter- 
mination about his quietness, which had not been 
seen in any other belligerent nation. France 
became consciously and tragically heroic when 
war commenced. England became unwontedly 
cheerful because life was moving on grander 
levels. In America there was no outward change. 
The old habit of feverish industry still persisted, 
but was intensified and applied in unselfish direc- 
tions. 

What has impressed me most in my tour of the 
American activities in France is the businesslike 
relentlessness of the preparations. Everything 
is being done on a titanic scale and everything 
is being done to last. The ports, the railroads, 
the plants that are being constructed will still be 
standing a hundred years from now. There's no 
"Home for Christmas" optimism about Amer- 
ica's method of making war. One would think 
she was expecting to be still fighting when all the 
present generation is dead. She is investing bil- 
lions of dollars in what can only be regarded as 
permanent improvements. The handsomeness of 
her spirit is illustrated by the fact that she has no 
understanding with the French for reimburse- 
ment. 



70 OUT TO WIN 

In sharp contrast with this handsomeness of 
spirit is the iciness of her purpose as regards the 
Boche. I heard no hatred of the individual Ger- 
man — only the deep conviction that Prussianism 
must be crushed at all costs. The American 
does not speak of "Poor old Fritz" as we do on 
our British Front. He's too logical to be sorry 
for his enemy. His attitude is too sternly im- 
personal for him to be moved by any emotions, 
whether of detestation or charity, as regards the 
Hun. All he knows is that a Frankenstein ma- 
chinery has been set in motion for the destruction 
of the world; to counteract it he is creating an- 
other piece of machinery. He has set about his 
job in just the same spirit that he set about over- 
coming the difficulties of the Panama Canal. He 
has been used to overcoming the obstinacies of 
Nature; the human obstinacies of his new task 
intrigue him. I believe that, just as in peace 
times big business was his romance and the wealth 
which he gained from it was often incidental, so 
in France the job as a job impels him, quite apart 
from its heroic object. After all, smashing the 
Pan-Germanic Combine is only another form of 
trust-busting — trust-busting with aeroplanes and 
guns instead of with law and ledgers. 

There is something almost terrifying to me 
about this quiet coUectedness — this Pierpont Mor- 



WAR AS A JOB 71 

gan touch of sphinxlike aloofness from either 
malice or mercy. Just as America once said, 
"Business is business" and formed her world- 
combines, collaring monopolies and allowing the 
individual to survive only by virtue of belonging 
to the fittest, so now she is saying, "War is war" 
— something to be accomplished with as little 
regard to landscapes as blasting a railroad across 
a continent. 

For the first time in the history of this war 
Germany is "up against" a nation which is going 
to fight her in her own spirit, borrowing her own 
methods. This statement needs explaining; its 
truth was first brought to my attention at Amer- 
ican General Headquarters. The French attitude 
towards the war is utterly personal ; it is bayonet 
to bayonet. It depends on the unflinching cour- 
age of every individual French man and woman. 
The English attitude is that of the knight-errant, 
seeking high adventures and welcoming death in 
a noble cause. But the German attitude disre- 
gards the individual and knows nothing of gal- 
lantry. It lacks utterly the spiritual elation which 
made the strength of the French at Verdun and 
of the English at Mons. The German attitude 
is that of a soulless organisation, invented for 
one purpose — profitable conquest. War for the 
Hun is not a final and dreaded atonement for the 



y2 OUT TO WIN 

restoring of justice to the world ; it is a business 
undertaking which, as he is fond of telling us, 
has never failed to yield him good interest on his 
capital. I have seen a good deal of the capital 
he has invested in the battlefields he has lost — men 
smashed to pulp, bruised by shells out of resem- 
blance to anything human, the breeding place of 
flies and pestilence, no longer the homes of loyal- 
ties and affections. I cannot conceive what per- 
centage of returns can be said to compensate for 
the agony expended on such indecent Golgothas. 
However, the Hun has assured us that it pays 
him; he flatters himself that he is a first-class 
business man. 

But so does the American, and he knows the 
game from more points of view. For years he 
has patterned his schools and colleges on German 
educational methods. What applies to his civilian 
centres of learning applies to his military as well. 
German text-books gave the basis for all Ameri- 
can military thought. American officers have 
been trained in German strategy just as thor- 
{ oughly as if they had lived in Potsdam. At the 
1 start of the war many of them were in the field 
with the German armies as observers. They are 
able to synchronise their thoughts with the 
thoughts of their German enemies and at the 



WAR AS A JOB 73 

same time to take advantage of all that the Allies 
can teach them. 

"War is a business," the Germans have said. 
The Americans, with an ideal shining in their 
eyes, have replied, "Very well. We didn't want 
to fight you ; but now that you have forced us, we 
will fight you on your own terms. We will make 
war on you as a business, for we are business- 
men. We will crush you coldly, dispassionately, 
without rancour, without mercy till we have 
proved to you that war is not profitable business, 
but hell." 

The American, as I have met him in France, 
has not changed one iota from the man that he 
was in New York or Chicago. He has trans- 
planted himself untheatrically to the scenes of bat- 
tlefields and set himself undisturbedly to the task 
of dying. There is an amazing normality about 
him. You find him in towns, ancient with cha- 
teaux and wonderful with age; he is absolutely 
himself, keenly efficient and irreverently modern. 
Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss 
border, from the Mediterranean to the English 
Channel, you see the lean figure and the slouch 
hat of the U. S. A. soldier. He is invariably 
well-conducted, almost always alone and usually 
gravely absorbed in himself. The excessive grav- 
ity of the American in khaki has astonished the 



74 OUT TO WIN 

men of the other armies who feel that, life being 
uncertain, it is well to make as genial a use of 
it as possible while it lasts. The soldier from 
the U. S. A. seems to stand always restless, 
alert, alone, listening — waiting for the call to 
come. He doesn't sink into the landscape the 
way other troops have done. His impatience 
picks him out — the impatience of a man in France 
solely for one purpose. I have seen him thus a 
thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the 
crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but 
himself. Every man and officer I have spoken to 
has just one thing to say about what is happen- 
ing inside him, "Let them take off my khaki and 
send me back to America, or else hurry me into 
the trenches. I came here to get started on this 
job; the v/aiting makes me tired." 

"Let me get into the trenches," that was the 
cry of the American soldier that I heard on every 
hand. Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness 
and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how 
he will acquit himself. 

I have presented him as an extremely practi- 
cal person, but no American that I ever met was 
solely practical. If you watch him closely you 
will always find that he is doing practical things 
for an idealistic end. The American who ac- 
cumulates a fortune to himself, whether it be 



WAR AS A JOB 75 

through corralling railroads, controlling indus- 
tries, developing mines or establishing a chain of 
dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the money only, 
but because he finds in business the poetry of 
creating, manipulating, evolving — the exhilara- 
tion and adventure of swaying power. And so 
there came a day when I caught my American 
soldier dreaming and off his guard. 

All day I had been motoring through high up- 
lands. It was a part of France with which I was 
totally unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting 
across the country, getting lost in valleys where 
it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught 
in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered ban- 
ners. Every now and then, with the suddenness 
of our approach, we would startle an aged shep- 
herd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling 
slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the 
sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had 
been strangely mystic. Time seemed a mood. I 
had ceased to trouble about where I was going; 
that I knew my ultimate destination was suffi- 
cient. The way that led to it, which I had never 
seen before, should never see again perhaps, and 
through which I travelled at the rate of an ex- 
press, seemed a fairy non-existent Hollow Land. 
Landscapes grew blurred with the speed of our 
passage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed 



y(i OUT TO WIN 

with us for a second and vanished. The staff- 
officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on his 
seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself 
in the morning, taking me now here to see an 
American Division putting on a manoeuvre, now 
there to where tlie artillery were practising, then 
to another valley where machine-guns tapped like 
thousands of busy typewriters working on death's 
manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges 
against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging 
— all the industrious pretence at slaughter which 
prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far 
away from all that now; the brown figures had 
melted into the brownness of the hills. There 
might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. 
Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I 
grew sleepy. My head nodded. I opened my 
eyes, pulled myself together and again nodded. 
The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush 
of wind lay heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed 
odd that I should be here and not in the trenches. 
When I was in the line I had often made up life's 
deficiencies by imagining, imagining. . . . Per- 
haps I was really in the line now. I wouldn't 
wake up to find out. That would come presently 
— it always had. 

We were slowing down. I opened my eyes 
lazily. No, we weren't stopping — only going 



WAR AS A JOB ^7 

through a village. What a quaint grey village 
it was — worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. 
I was on the point of drowsing off again when 
I caught sight of a word written on a sign-board, 
Domremy. My brain cleared. I sat up with a 
jerk. It was magic that I should find myself 
here without warning — at Domremy, the Beth- 
lehem of warrior-woman's mercy. I had 
dreamed from boyhood of this place as a legend 
— a memory of white chivalry to be found on no 
map, a record of beauty as utterly submerged 
as the lost land of Lyonesse. Hauntingly the 
words came back, "Who is this that cometh from 
Domremy? Who is she in bloody coronation 
robes from Rheims ? Who is she that cometh with 
blackened flesh from walking in the furnaces of 
Rouen? This is she, the shepherd girl. . . ." 
All about me on the little hills were the wood- 
lands through which she must have led her sheep 
and wandered with her heavenly visions. 

We had come to a bend in the village street. 
Where the road took a turn stood an aged 
church; nestling beside it in a little garden was 
B. grey, semi-fortified mediaeval dwelling. The 
garden was surrounded by high spiked railings, 
planted on a low stone wall. Sitting on the wall 
beside the entrance was an American soldier. He 
had a small French child on either knee— one 



78 OUT TO WIN 

arm about each of them; thus embarrassed he 
was doing his patient best to roll a Bull Durham 
cigarette. The children were vividly interested; 
they laughed up into the soldier's face. One of 
them was a boy, the other a girl. The long 
golden curls of the girl brushed against the sol- 
dier's cheek. The three heads bent together, al- 
most touching. The scene was timelessly human, 
despite the modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc 
might have been that little girl. 

I stopped the driver, got out and approached 
the group. The soldier jumped to attention and 
saluted. In answer to my question, he said, "Yes, 
this is where she lived. That's her house — that 
grey cottage with scarcely any windows. Bastien 
le Page could never have seen it ; it isn't a bit 
like his picture in the Metropolitan Gallery." 

He spoke in a curiously intimate way as if he 
had known Joan of Arc and had spoken with 
her there — as if she had only just departed. It 
was odd to reflect that America had still lain hid- 
den behind the Atlantic when Joan walked the 
world. 

We entered the gate into the garden, the Amer- 
ican soldier, the children and I together. The 
little girl, with that wistful confidence that all 
French children show for men in khaki, slipped 



WAR AS A JOB 79 

her grubby little paw into my hand. I expect 
Joan was often grubby like that. 

Brown winter leaves strewed the path. The 
grass was bleached and dead. At our approach 
an old sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked 
out of his kennel. He was shaggy and matted 
with years. His bark was so weak that it broke 
in the middle. He was a Rip Van Winkle of a 
sheepndog — the kind of dog you would picture 
in a fairy-tale. One couldn't help feeling that he 
had accompanied the shepherd girl and had kept 
the flock from straying while she spoke with 
her visions. All those centuries ago he had seen 
her ride away — ride away to save France — and 
she had not come back. All through the centuries 
he had waited; at every footstep on the path he 
had come hopefully out from his kennel, wagging 
his tail and barking ever more weakly. He would 
not believe that she was dead. And it was diffi- 
cult to believe it in that ancient quiet. If ever 
France needed her, it was now. 

Across my memory flashed the words of a 
dreamer, prophetic in the light of recent events, 
"Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of 
thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the 
sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but 
she will not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors 
to come and receive a robe of honour, but she 



8o OUT TO WIN 

will not be found. When the thunders of uni- 
versal France, as even yet may happen, shall 
proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl 
that gave up her all for her country, thy ear, 
young shepherd girl, will have been deaf five 
centuries." 

Quite illogically it seemed to me that January 
evening that this American soldier was the sym- 
bol of the power that had come in her stead. 

The barking of the dog had awakened a bowed 
old Mother Hubbard lady. She opened the door 
of her diminutive castle and peered across the 
threshold, jingling her keys. 

Would we come in? Ah, Monsieur from 
America was there ! He was always there when 
he was not training, playing with the children and 
rolling cigarettes. And Monsieur, the English 
officer, perhaps he did not know that she was de- 
scended from Joan's family. Oh, yes, there was 
no mistake about it; that was why she had been 
made custodian. She must light the lamp. There ! 
That was better. There was not much to see, 
but if we would follow 

We stepped down into a flagged room like a 
cellar — cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big 
open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by mas- 
sive masonry and blackened by the fires of im- 
memorial winters. This was where Joan's par- 



WAR AS A JOB 8i 

ents had lived. She had probably been born here. 
The picture that formed in my mind was not of 
Joan, but that other woman unknown to history 
— her mother, who after Joan had left the village 
and rumours of her battles and banquets drifted 
back, must have sat there staring into the blazing 
logs, her peasant's hands folded in her lap, brood- 
ing, wondering, hoping, fearing — fearing as the 
mothers of soldiers have throughout the ages. 

And this was Joan's brother's room — a cheer- 
less place of hewn stone. What kind of a man 
could he have been? What were his reflections 
as he went about his farm-work and thought of 
his sister at the head of armies? Was he merely 
a lout or something worse — the prototype of our 
Conscientious Objector : a coward who disguised 
his cowardice with moral scruples? 

And this was Joan's room — a cell, with a nar- 
row slit at the end through which one gained a 
glimpse of the church. Before this slit she had 
often knelt while the angels drifted from the 
belfry like doves to peer in on her. The place 
was sacred. How many nights had she spent 
here with girlish folded hands, her face ecstatic, 
the cold eating into her tender body? I see her 
blue for lack of charity, forgotten, unloved, neg- 
lected — the symbol of misunderstanding and lone- 
liness. They told her she was mad. She was a 



82 OUT TO WIN 

laughing stock in the village. The world could 
find nothing better for her to do than driving 
sheep through the bitter woodlands; but God 
found time to send his angels. Yes, she was 
mad — mad as Christ was in Galilee — mad 
enough to save others when she could not save 
herself. How nearly the sacrifice of this most 
child-like of women parallels the sacrifice of the 
most God-like of men! Both were born in a 
shepherd community; both forewent the hu- 
manity of love and parenthood; both gave up 
their lives that the world might be better; both 
were royally apparelled in mockery; both fol- 
lowed their visions; for each the price of follow- 
ing was death. She, too, was despised and re- 
jected; as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 
so she opened not her mouth. 

That is all there is to see at Domremy; three 
starveling, stone-paved rooms, a crumbling 
church, a garden full of dead leaves, an old dog 
growing mangy in his kennel and the wind- 
swept cathedral of the woodlands. The soul of 
France was born there in the humble body of a 
peasant-girl ; yes, and more than the soul of 
France — the gallantry of all womanhood. God 
must be fond of His peasants; I think they will 
be His aristocracy in Heaven. 

The old lady led us out of the house. There 



WAR AS A JOB 83 

was one more thing- she wished to show us. The 
sunset light was still in the tree-tops, but her eyes 
were dim; she thought that night had already 
gathered. Holding her lamp above her head, 
she pointed to a statue in a niche above the door- 
way. It had been placed there by order of the 
King of France after Joan was dead. But it 
wasn't so much the statue that she wanted us to 
look at ; it was the mutilations that were upon it. 
She was filled with a great trembling of indig- 
nation. "Yes, gaze your fill upon it, Messieurs," 
she said; "it was les Boches did that. They 
were here in 1870. To others she may be a saint, 
but to them — Bah!" and she spat, "a woman is 
less than a woman always." 

When we turned to go she was still cursing 
les Bodies beneath her breath, tremblingly hold- 
ing up the lamp above her head that she might 
forget nothing of their defilement. The old dog 
rattled his chain as we passed; he knew us now 
and did not trouble to come out. The dead 
leaves whispered beneath our tread. 

At the gate we halted. I turned to my Amer- 
ican soldier. "How long before you go into 
the line?" 

He was carrying the little French girl in his 
arms. As he glanced up to answer, his face 
caught the sunset. "Soon now. The sooner, 



84 OUT TO WIN 

the better. She . . , ," and I knew he meant 
no living woman. "This place ... I don't 
know how to express it. But everything here 
makes you want to fight, — makes you ashamed 
of standing idle. If she could do that — well, I 
guess that I. . . ." 

He made no attempt to fill his eloquent si- 
lences; and so I left. As the car gathered speed, 
plunging into the pastoral solitudes, I looked 
back. The last sight I had of Domremy was a 
grey little garden, made sacred by the centuries, 
and an American soldier standing with a French 
child in his arms, her golden hair lying thickly 
against his neck. 

On the surface the American is unemotionally 
practical, but at heart he is a dreamer, first, last 
and always. If the Americans have merited any 
criticism in France, it is owing to the vastness 
of their plans; the tremendous dream of their 
preparations postpones the beginning of the real- 
ity. Their mistake, if they have made a mis- 
take, is an error of generosity. They are build- 
ing with a view to flinging millions into the line 
when thousands a little earlier would be of super- 
lative advantage. They had the choice of drib- 
bling their men over in small contingents or of 
waiting till they could put a fighting-force into 
the field so overwhelming in equipment and 



WAR AS A JOB 85 

numbers that its weight would be decisive. They 
were urged to learn wisdom from England's ex- 
ample and not to waste their strength by put- 
ting men into the trenches in a hurry before they 
were properly trained. England was compelled 
to adopt this chivalrous folly by the crying need 
of France. It looked in the Spring of 1917, be- 
fore Russia had broken down or the pressure on 
the Italian front had become so menacing, as 
though the Allies could afford to ask America 
to conduct her war on the lines of big business. 
America jumped at the chance — big business be- 
ing the task to which her national genius was best 
suited. If her Allies could hold on long enough, 
she would build her fleet and appear with an 
army of millions that would bring the war to a 
rapid end. Her role was to be that of the toreador 
in the European bull-fight. 

But big business takes time and usually loses 
money at the start. In the light of recent de- 
velopments, we would rather have the bird-in- 
the-hand of 300,000 Americans actually fighting 
than the promise of a host a year from now. 
People at home in America realised this in Jan- 
uary. They were so afraid that their Allies 
might feel disappointed. They were so keen to 
achieve tangible results in the war that they grew 
impatient with the long delay. They weren't 



86 OUT TO WIN 

interested in seeing other nations going over the 
top — the same nations who had been over so 
many times; they wanted to see their sons and 
brothers at once given the opportunity to share 
the wounds and the danger. Their attitude was 
Spartan and splendid; they demanded a curtail- 
ment of their respite that they might find them- 
selves afloat on the crimson tide. The cry of 
the civilians in America was identical with that 
of their men in France. "Let them take off our 
khaki or else hurry us into the trenches. We want 
to get started. This waiting makes us tired." 

And the civilians in America had earned a 
right to make their demand. Industrially, finan- 
cially, philanthropically, from every point of view 
they had sacrificed and played the game, both by 
the Allies and their army. When they, as civil- 
ians, had been so willing to wear the stigmata 
of sacrifice, they were jealous lest their fighting 
men should be baulked of their chance of making 
those sacrifices appear worth while. 

There have been many accusations in the States 
with regard to the supposed breakdown of their 
military organization in France — accusations in- 
spired by generosity towards the Allies. From 
what I have seen, and I have been given liberal 
opportunities to see everything, I do not think 
that those accusations are justified. As a com- 



WAR AS A JOB 87 

batant of another nation, I have my standards 
of comparison by which to judge and I frankly 
state that I was amazed with the progress that 
had been made. It is a progress based on a huge 
scale and therefore less impressive to the layman 
than if the scale had been less ambitious. What 
I saw were the foundations of an organisation 
which can be expanded to handle a fighting-ma- 
chine which staggers the imagination. What 
the layman expects to see are Hun trophies and 
Americans coming out of the line on stretchers. 
He will see all that, if he waits long enough, 
for the American military hospitals in France 
are being erected to accommodate 200,000 
wounded. 

Unfounded optimisms, which under no pos- 
sible circumstances could ever have been realised, 
are responsible for the disappointment felt in 
America. Inasmuch as these optimisms were 
widely accepted in England and France, civilian 
America's disappointment will be shared by the 
Allies, unless some hint of the truth is told as 
to what may be expected and what great prepara- 
tions are under construction. It was generally 
believed that by the spring of 19 18 America 
would have half a million men in the trenches 
and as many more behind the lines, training to 
become reinforcements. People who spoke this 



88 OUT TO WIN 

way could never have seen a hundred thousand 
men or have stopped to consider what transport 
would be required to maintain them at a distance 
of more than three thousand miles from their 
base. It was also believed that by the April of 
1 91 8, one year after the declaring of war, Amer- 
ica would have manufactured ten thousand planes, 
standardised all their parts, trained the requisite 
number of observers and pilots, and would have 
them flying over the Hun lines. Such beliefs 
were pure moonshine, incapable of accomplish- 
ment; but there are facts to be told which are 
highly honourable. 

So far I have tried to give a glimpse of Amer- 
ica's fighting spirit in facing up to her job; now, 
in as far as it is allowed, I want to give a sketch 
of her supreme earnestness as proved by what 
she was already achieved in France. The ear- 
nestness of her civilians should require no further 
proof than the readiness with which they ac- 
cepted national conscription within a few hours 
of entering the war — a revolutionising departure 
which it took England two years of fighting even 
to contemplate, and which can hardly be said to 
be in full operation yet, so long as conscientious 
objectors are allowed to air their so-called con- 
sciences. In America the conscientious objector 
is not regarded; he is listened to as only one of 



WAR AS A JOB 89 

two things — a deserter or a traitor. The earnest- 
ness of America's fighting man requires no prov- 
ing; his only grievance is that he is not in the 
trenches. Yet so long as the weight of America 
is not felt to be turning the balance dramatically 
in our favour, the earnestness of America will 
be open to challenge both by Americans and by 
the Allies. What I saw in France in the early 
months of this year has filled me with unbounded 
optimism. I feel the elated certainty, as never 
before even in the moment of the most success- 
ful attack, that the Hun's fate is sealed. What 
is more, I have grounds for believing that he 
knows it — knows that the collapse of Russia will 
profit him nothing because he cannot withstand 
the avalanche of men from America. Already he 
hears them, as I have seen them, training in their 
camps from the Pacific to the Atlantic, racing 
across the Ocean in their grey transports, march- 
ing along the dusty roads of two continents, a 
procession locust-like in multitude, stretching half 
about the world, marching and singing indomi- 
tably, "We've got four years to do this job." 
From behind the Rhine he has caught their sing- 
ing; it grows ever nearer, stronger. It will take 
time for that avalanche to pyramid on the West- 
em Front ; but when it has piled up, it will rush 
forward, fall on him and crush him. He knows 



90 OUT TO WIN 

something- else, which fills him with a still more 
dire sense of calamity — that because America's 
honour has been jeopardised, of all the nations 
now fighting she will be the last to lay down 
her arms. She has given herself four years to 
do her job; when her job is ended, it will be 
with Prussianism as it was with Jezebel, "They 
that went to bury her found no more of her than 
the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. 
And her carcase was as dung upon the face of the 
field, so that men should not say, 'This ij 
Jezebel.' " 

As an example of what America is accomplish- 
ing, I will take a sample port in France. It was 
of tenth-rate importance, little more than a har- 
bour for coastwise vessels and ocean-going 
tramps when the Americans took it over; by the 
time they have finished, it will be among the first 
ports of Europe. It is only one of several that 
they are at present enlarging and constructing. 
The work already completed has been done in the 
main under the direction of the engineers who 
marched through London in the July of last 
year. I visited the port in January, so some idea 
can be gained of how much has been achieved in 
a handful of months. 

The original French town still has the aspect 
of a prosperous fishing-village. There are two 



WAR AS A JOB 91 

main streets with shops on them; there is one 
out-of-date hotel; there are a few modern dwell- 
ings facing the sea. For the rest, the town con- 
sists of cottages, alleys and open spaces where the 
nets were once spread to dry. To-day in a vast 
circle, as far as eye can reach, a city of huts 
has grown up. In those huts live men of many 
nations, Americans, French, German prisoners, 
negroes. They are all engaged in the stupendous 
task of construction. The capacity of the har- 
bour basin is being multiplied fifty times, the 
berthing capacity trebled, the unloading facilities 
multiplied by ten. A railroad yard is being laid 
which will contain 225 miles of track and 870 
switches. An immense locomotive-works is being 
erected for the repairing and assembling of roll- 
ing-stock from America. It was originally 
planned to bring over 960 standard locomotives 
and 30,000 freight-cars from the States, all 
equipped with French couplers and brakes so that 
they could become a permanent part of the 
French railroad system. These figures have since 
been somewhat reduced by the purchase of roll- 
ing-stock in Europe. Reservoirs are being built 
at some distance from the town which will be able 
to supply six millions gallons of purified water a 
day. In order to obtain the necessary quantity 
of pipe, piping will be torn up from various of 



92 OUT TO WIN 

the water-systems in America and brought across 
the Atlantic. As the officer, who was my inform- 
ant remarked, "Rather than see France go short, 
some city in the States will have to haul water 
in carts." 

As proof of the efficiency with which materials 
from America are being furnished, when the en- 
gineers arrived on the scene with 225 miles of 
track to lay, they found 100 miles of rails and 
spikes already waiting for them. Of the 870 
switches required, 350 were already on hand. 
Of the ties required, one-sixth were piled up for 
them to be going on with. Not so bad for a na- 
tion quite new to the war-game and living three 
thousand miles beyond the horizon! 

On further enquiry I learnt that six million 
cubic yards of filling were necessary to raise the 
ground of the railroad yard to the proper level. 
In order that the work may be hurried, dredges 
are being brought across the Atlantic and, if ne- 
cessary, harbour construction in the States will be 
curtailed. 

I was interested in the personnel employed in 
this work. Here, as elsewhere, I found that the 
engineering and organising brains of America 
are largely in France. One colonel was head of 
the marble industry in the States ; another had 
been vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. 



WAR AS A JOB 93 

Another man, holding a sergeant's rank was gen- 
eral manager of the biggest fishing company. An- 
other, a private in the ranks, was chief engineer 
of the American Aluminum Company. A major 
was general manager of The Southern Pacific. 
Another colonel was formerly controller of the 
currency and afterwards president of the Central 
Trust Company of Illinois. A captain was chief 
engineer and built the aqueducts over the keyes 
of the Florida East Coast Railroad. As with us, 
you found men of the highest social and profes- 
sional grade serving in every rank of the Amer- 
ican Army; one, a society man and banker, was 
running a gang of negroes whose job it was to 
shovel sand into cars. In peace times thirty 
thousand pounds a year could not have bought 
him. What impressed me even more than the 
line of communications itself was the quality of 
the men engaged on its construction. As one of 
them said to me, "Any job that they give us engi- 
neers to do over here is likely to be small in com- 
parison with the ones we've had to tackle in 
America." The man who said this had previously 
done his share in the building of the Panama 
Canal. There were others I met, men who had 
spanned rivers in Alaska, flung rails across the 
Rockies, built dams in the arid regions, per- 
formed engineering feats in China, Africa, Rus- 



94 OUT TO WIN 

sia — in all parts of the world. They were trained 
to be undaunted by the hugeness of any task; 
they'd always beaten Nature in the long run. 
Their cheerful certainty that America in France 
was more than up to her job maintained a con- 
stant wave of enthusiasm. 

It may be asked why it is necessary in an old- 
established country like France, to waste time in 
enlarging harbours before you can make effective 
war. The answer is simple: France has not 
enough ports of sufficient size to handle the ton- 
nage that is necessary to support the Allied annies 
within her borders. America's greatest problem 
is tonnage. She has the men and the materials in 
prodigal quantities, but they are all three thou- 
sand miles away. Before the men can be brought 
over, she has to establish her means of transport 
and line of communications, so as to make cer- 
tain that she can feed and clothe them when once 
she has got them into the front-line. There are 
two ways of economising on tonnage. One is 
to purchase in Europe. In this way, up to Feb- 
ruary, The Purchasing Board of the Americans 
had saved ninety days of transatlantic traffic. 
The other way is to have modern docks, well 
railroaded, so that vessels can be unloaded in the 
least possible space of time and sent back for 
other cargoes. Hence it has been sane economy 



WAR AS A JOB 95 

on the part of America to put much of her early 
energy into construction rather than into fighting. 
Nevertheless, it has made her an easy butt for 
criticism both in the States and abroad, since the 
only proof to the newspaper-reader that America 
is at war is the amount of front-line that she is 
actually defending. 

I had heard much of what was going on at a 
certain place which was to be the intennediate 
point in the American line of communications. I 
had studied a blue-print map and had been amazed 
at its proportions. I was told, and can well be- 
lieve, that when completed it was to be the big- 
gest undertaking of its kind in the world. It was 
to be six and a half miles long by about one 
mile broad. It was to have four and a half mil- 
lion feet of covered storage and ten million feet 
of open storage. It was to contain over two 
hundred miles of track in its railroad yard and to 
house enough of the materials of war to keep a 
million men fully equipped for thirty days. In 
addition to this it was to have a plant, not for the 
repairing, but merely for the assembling of aero- 
planes, which would employ twenty thousand 
men. 

I arrived there at night. There was no town. 
One stepped from the train into the open coun- 
try. Far away in the distance there was a glim- 



96 OUT TO WIN 

mering of fires and the scarlet of sparks shooting 
up between bare tree-tops. My first impression 
was of the fragrance of pines and, after that, as 
I approached the huts, of a memory more definite 
and elusively famihar. The swinging of lanterns 
helped to bring it back : I was remembering lum- 
ber-camps in the Rocky Mountains. The box- 
stove in the shack in which I slept that night and 
the roughly timbered walls served to heighten the 
illusion that I was in America. Next morning 
the illusion was completed. Here were men with 
mackinaws and green elk boots ; here were cook- 
houses in which the only difference was that a sol- 
dier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman ; and 
above all, here were fir and pines growing out of 
a golden soil, with a soft wind blowing overhead. 
And here, in an extraordinary way, the democ- 
racy of a lumber-camp had been reproduced : 
every one from the Colonel down was a worker; 
it was difficult, apart from their efficiency, to tell 
their rank. 

Early in the morning I started out on a gaso- 
lene-speeder to make the tour. At an astonish- 
ing rate, for the work had only been in hand 
three months, the vast acreage was being tracked 
and covered with the sheds. The sheds were not 
the kind I had been used to on my own front; 
they were built out of anything that came handy, 



WAR AS A JOB 97 

commenced with one sort of material and fin- 
ished with another. Sometimes the cross-pieces 
in the roofs were still sweating, proving that it 
was only yesterday they had been cut down in the 
nearby wood. There was no look of permanence 
about anything. As the officer who conducted me 
said, "It's all run up — a race against time." And 
then he added with a twinkle in his eye, "But 
it's good enough to last four years." 

This was America in France in every sense of 
the word. One felt the atmosphere of rush. In 
the buildings, which should have been left when 
materials failed, but which had been carried to 
completion by pioneer methods, one recognised 
the resourcefulness of the lumberman of the 
West. Then came a touch of Eastern America, 
to me almost more replete with memory and ex- 
citement. In a flash I was transferred from a 
camp in France to the rock-hewn highway of 
Fifth Avenue, running through groves of sky- 
scrapers, garnished with sunshine and echoing 
with tripping footsteps. I could smell the asphalt 
soaked with gasolene and the flowers worn by the 
passing girls. The whole movement and quick- 
ness of the life I had lost flooded back on me. 
The sound I heard was the fate motif of the fran- 
tic opera of American endeavour. The truly 
wonderful thing was that I should hear it hereu 



98 OUT TO WIN 

in a woodland in France — the rapid tapping of a 
steel-riveter at work. 

I learnt afterwards that I was not the only one 
to be carried away by that music, as of a mon- 
strous wood-pecker in an iron forest. The first 
day tlie riveter was employed, the whole camp 
made excuses to come and listen to it. They stood 
round it in groups, deafened and thrilled — and a 
little homesick. What the bag-pipe is to the 
Scotchman, the steel-riveter is to the American — 
the instrument which best expresses his soul to 
a world which is different. 

I found that the riveter was being employed in 
the erection of an immense steel and concrete re- 
frigerating plant, which was to have machinery 
for the production of its own ice and sufficient 
meat-storage capacity to provide a million men 
for thirty days. The water for the ice was being 
obtained from wells which had been already sunk. 
There was only surface water there when the 
Americans first struck camp. 

As another clear-cut example of what Amer- 
ica is accomplishing in France, I will take an avia- 
tion-camp. This camp is one of several, yet it 
alone will be turning out from 350 to 400 airmen 
a month. The area which it covers runs into 
miles. The Americans have their own ideas of 
aerial fighting tactics, which they will teach here 



WAR AS A JOB 99 

on an intensive course and try out on the Hun 
from time to time. Some of their experts have 
had the advantage of famiharising themselves 
with Hun aerial equipment and strategy; they 
were on his side of the line at the start of the 
war as neutral military observers. I liked the 
officer at the head of this camp ; I was particularly 
pleased with some of his phrases. He was one of 
the first experts to fly with a Liberty engine. 
Without giving any details away, he assured me 
impressively that it was "an honest-to-God en- 
gine" and that his planes were equipped with 
"an honest-to-God machine-gun," and that he 
looked forward with cheery anticipation to the 
first encounter his chaps would have with "the 
festive Hun." He was one of the few Americans 
I had met who spoke with something of our 
scornful affection for the enemy. It indicated to 
me his absolute certainty that he could beat him 
at the flying game. On his lips the Hun was 
never the German or the Boche, but always "the 
festive Hun." You can afford to speak kindly, 
almost pityingly of some one you are going to 
vanquish. Hatred often indicates fear. Jocu- 
larity is a victorious sign. 

When I was in America last October a great 
effort was being made to produce an overwhelm- 
ing quantity of aeroplanes. Factories, both large 



loo OUT TO WIN 

and small, in every State were specializing on 
manufacturing certain parts, the idea being that 
so time would be saved and efficiency gained. 
These separate parts were to be collected and 
assembled at various big government plants. The 
aim was to turn out planes as rapidly as Ford 
Cars and to swamp the Hun with numbers. 
America is unusually rich in the human as well as 
the mechanical material for crushing the enemy in 
the air. In this service, as in all the others, the 
only difficulty that prevents her from making her 
fighting strength immediately felt is the difficulty 
of transportation. The road of ships across the 
Atlantic has to be widened; the road of steel 
from the French ports to the Front has to be 
tracked and multiplied in its carrying capacity. 
These difficulties on land and water are being 
rapidly overcome: by adding to the means of 
transportation; by increasing the efficiency of the 
transport facilities already existing ; by lightening 
the tonnage to be shipped from the States by buy- 
ing everything that is procurable in Europe. In 
the early months much of the available Atlantic 
tonnage was occupied with carrying the materials 
of construction: rails, engines, concrete, lumber, 
and all the thousand and one things that go to 
the housing of armies. This accounts for Amer- 
ica's delay in starting fighting. For three years 



WAR AS A JOB loi 

Europe had been ransacked ; very much of what 
America would require had to be brought. Such 
work does not make a dramatic impression on 
other nations, especially when they are impatient. 
Its value as a contribution towards defeating the 
Hun is all in the future. Only victories win 
applause in these days. Nevertheless, such work 
had to be done. To do it thoroughly, on a suffi- 
ciently large scale, in the face of the certain 
criticism which the delay for thoroughness would 
occasion, demanded bravery and patriotism on the 
part of those in charge of affairs. By the time 
this book is published their high-mindedness will 
have begim to be appreciated, for the results of 
it will have begun to tell. The results will tell 
increasingly as the war progresses. America is 
determined to have no Crimea scandals. The con- 
tentment and good condition of her troops in 
France will be largely owing to the organisation 
and care with which her line of communications 
has been constructed. 

The purely business side of war is very 
dimly comprehended either by the civilian or the 
combatant. The combatant, since he does what- 
ever dying is to be done, naturally looks down on 
the business man in khaki. The civilian is in- 
clined to think of war in terms of the mobile war- 
fare of other days, when armies were rarely more 



102 OUT TO WIN 

than some odd thousands strong and were usually 
no more than expeditionary forces. Such armies 
by reason of their rapid movements and the com- 
parative fewness of their numbers, were able to 
live on the countries through which they marched. 
But our fighting forces of to-day are the man- 
hood of nations. The fronts which they occupy 
can scarcely boast a blade of grass. The towns 
which lie behind them have been picked clean to 
the very marrow. France herself, into which a 
military population of many millions has been 
poured, was never at the best of times entirely 
self-supporting. Whatever surplus of commod- 
ities the Allies possessed, they had already shared 
long before the spring of 191 7. When America 
landed into the war, she found herself in the posi- 
tion of one who arrives at an overcrowded inn late 
at night. Whatever of food or accommodation 
the inn could afford had been already appor- 
tioned; consequently, before America could put 
her first million men into the trenches, she had to 
graft on to France a piece of the living tissue of 
her own industrial system — whole cities of repair- 
shops, hospitals, dwellings, store-houses, ice- 
plants, etc., together with the purely business per- 
sonnel that go with them. These cities, though 
initially planned to maintain and furnish a mini- 
mum number of fighting men, had to be capable 



WAR AS A JOB 103 

of expansion so that they could ultimately sup- 
port millions. 

Here are some facts and statistics which illus- 
trate the big business of war as Americans have 
undertaken it. They have had to erect cold stor- 
age-plants, with mechanical means for ice-manu- 
facture, of sufficient capacity to hold twenty-five 
million pounds of beef always in readiness. 

They are at present constructing two salvage 
depots which, when completed, will be the largest 
in the world. Here they will repair and make fit 
for service again, shoes, harness, clothing, web- 
bing, tentage, rubber-boots, etc. Attached to 
these buildings there are to be immense laundries 
which will undertake the washing for all the 
American forces. In connection with the depots, 
there will be a Salvage Corps, whose work is 
largely at the Front. The materials which they 
collect will be sent back to the depots for sorting. 
Under the American system every soldier, on 
coming out of the trenches, will receive a com- 
plete new outfit, from the soles of his feet to the 
crown of his head. "This," the General who in- 
formed me said tersely, "is our way of solving 
the lice-problem." 

The Motor Transport also has its salvage de- 
pot. Knock-down buildings and machinery have 
been brought over from the States, and upwards 



104 OUT TO WIN 

of 4,000 trained mechanics for a start. This de- 
pot is also responsible for the repairs of all horse- 
drawn transport, except the artillery. The Quar- 
termaster General's Department alone will have 
35,000 motor propelled vehicles and a personnel 
of 160,000 men. 

Every effort is being made to employ labour- 
saving devices to the fullest extent. The Supply 
Department expects to cut down its personnel by 
two-thirds through the efficient use of machinery 
and derricks. The order compelling all packages 
to be standardized in different graded sizes, so 
that they can be forwarded directly to the Front 
before being broken, has already done much to 
expedite transportation. The dimensions of the 
luggage of a modem army can be dimly realized 
when it is stated that tlie American armies will 
initially require twenty-four million square feet 
of covered and forty-one million of unroofed 
storage — not to mention the barrack space. 

Within the next few months they will require 
bakeries capable of feeding one million and a 
quarter men. These bakeries are divided into : 
the field bakeries, which are portable, and the 
mechanical bakeries which are stationary and on 
the line of communications. One of the latter had 
just been acquired and was described to me when 
I was in the American area. It was planned 



WAR AS A JOB 105 

throughout with a view to labour-saving. It was 
so constructed that it could take the flour off the 
cars and, with practically no handling, convert it 
into bread at the rate of 750,000 lbs. a day. This 
struck me as a peculiarly American contribution 
to big business methods; but on expressing this 
opinion I was immediately corrected. This form 
of bakery was a British invention, which has been 
in use for some time on our lines. The Americans 
owed their possession of the bakery to the cour- 
tesy of the British Government, who had post- 
poned their own order and allowed the Americans 
to fill theirs four months ahead of their con- 
tract. 

This is a sample of the kind of discovery that 
I was perpetually making. Two out of three 
times when I thought I had run across a charac- 
teristically American expression of efficiency, I 
was told that it had been copied from the British. 
I learnt more about my own army's business 
efficiency in studying it secondhand with the 
Americans, than I had ever guessed existed in all 
the time that I had been an inhabitant of the 
British Front. It is characteristic of us as a peo- 
ple that we like to pretend that we muddle our 
way into success. We advertise our mistakes and 
camouflage our virtues. We are almost ashamed 
of gaining credit for anything that we have done 



io6 OUT TO WIN 

well. There is a fine dishonesty about this self- 
belittlement ; but it is not always wise. During 
these first few months of their being at war the 
Americans have discovered England in almost as 
novel a sense as Columbus did America. It was 
a joy to be with them and to watch their sur- 
prise. The odd thing was that they had had to go 
to France to find us out. Here they were, the 
picked business men of the world's greatest indus- 
trial nation, frankly and admiringly hats off to 
British "muddle-headed" methods. Not only 
were they hats off to the methods, many of which 
they were copying, but they were also hats off to 
the generous helpfulness of our Government and 
Military authorities in the matter of advice, co- 
operation and supplies. From the private in the 
ranks, who had been trained by British N. C. O.'s 
and Officers, to the Generals at the head of de- 
partments, there was only one feeling expressed 
for Great Britain — that of a new sincerity of 
friendship and admiration. "John Bull and his 
brother Jonathan" had become more than an 
empty phrase ; it expressed a true and living rela- 
tion. 

A similar spirit of appreciation had grown up 
towards the French — not the emotional, histri- 
onic, Lafayette appreciation with which the 
American troops sailed from America, but an ap- 



WAR AS A JOB 107 

preciation based on sympathy and a knowledge of 
deeds and character. I think this spirit was best 
illustrated at Christmas when all over France, 
wherever American troops were billeted, the rank 
and file put their hands deep into their pockets to 
give the refugee children of their district the first 
real Christmas they had had since their country 
was invaded. Officers were selected to go to 
Paris to do the purchasing of the presents, and I 
know of at least one case in which the men's gift 
was so generous that there was enough money left 
over to provide for the children throughout the 
coming year. 

In France one hears none of that patronising 
criticism which used to exist in America with 
regard to the older nations — none of those ar- 
rogant assertions that "because we are younger 
we can do things better." The bias of the Amer- 
ican in France is all the other way; he is near 
enough to the Judgment Day, which he is shortly 
to experience, to be reverent in the presence of 
those who have stood its test. He is in France 
to learn as well as to contribute. Between him- 
self and his brother soldiers of the British and 
French armies, there exists an entirely manly and 
reciprocal respect. And it is reciprocal; both 
the individual British and French fighting-man, 
now that they have seen the American soldier. 



io8 OUT TO WIN 

are clamorous to have him adjacent to their line. 
The American has scarcely been blooded at this 
moment, and yet, having seen him, they are both 
certain that he's not the pal to let them down. 

The confidence that the American soldier has 
created among his soldier-Allies was best ex- 
pressed to me by a British officer : "The British, 
French and Americans are the three great prom- 
ise-keeping nations. For the first time in his- 
tory we're standing together. W^e're promise- 
keepers banded together against the falsehood of 
Germany — that's why. It isn't likely that we 
shall start to tell lies to one another." 

Not Hkely ! 



Ill 

THE WAR OF COMPASSION 

Officially America declared war on Germany in 
the spring of 19 17; actually she committed her 
heart to the allied cause in September, 19 14, when 
the first shipment of the supplies of mercy arrived 
in Paris from the American Red Cross. 

There are two ways of waging war: you can 
fight with artillery and armed men ; you can fight 
with ambulances and bandages. There's the war 
of destruction and the war of compassion. The 
one defeats the enemy directly with force; the 
other defeats him indirectly by maintaining the 
morale of the men who are fighting and, what is 
equally important, of the civilians behind the 
lines. Belgium would not be the utterly defiant 
and imconquered nation that she is to-day, had 
it not been for the mercy of Hoover and his dis- 
ciples. Their voluntary presence made the cap- 
tured Belgian feel that he was earning the thanks 
of all time — that the eyes of the world were 
upon him. They were neutrals, but their mere 

109 



no OUT TO WIN 

presence condemned the cause that had brought 
them there. Their compassion waged war against 
the Hun. The same is true of the American Am- 
bulance Units which followed the French Armies 
into the fiercest of the carnage. They confirmed 
the poilu in his burning sense of injustice. That 
they, who could have absented themselves, should 
choose the damnation of destruction and dare the 
danger, convinced the entire French nation of 
its own righteousness. And it was true of the 
girls at the American hospitals who nursed the 
broken bodies which their brothers had rescued. 
It was true of Miss Holt's Lighthouse for the 
training of blinded soldiers, which she established 
in Paris within eight months of war's commence- 
ment. It was true of the American Relief Clear- 
ing House in Paris which, up to January, 191 7, 
had received 291 shipments and had distributed 
eight million francs. By the time America put 
on armour, the American Red Cross, as the 
army's expert in the strategy of compassion, 
found that it had to take over more than eighty- 
six separate organisations which had been operat- 
ing in France for the best part of two years. 

One cannot show pity with indignant hands 
and keep the mind neutral. The Galilean test 
holds true, "He who is not for me is against me." 
You cannot leave houses, lands, children, wife — 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION iii 

everything that counts — for the Kingdom of 
Heaven's sake without developing a rudimentary 
aversion for the devil. All of which goes to prove 
that America's heart was fighting for the Allies 
long before her ambassador requested his pass- 
ports from the Kaiser. 

The American Red Cross Commission landed 
in France on the 12th of June, 19 17, seven days 
ahead of the Expeditionary Force. It had taken 
less than five days to organise. Its first act was 
to convey a monetary gift to the French hos- 
pitals. The first actual American Red Cross con- 
tribution was made in April to the Number Five 
British Base Hospital. The first American sol- 
diers in France were doctors and nurses. The 
first American fighting done in France was done 
with the weapons of pity. The chief function of 
the American Red Cross up to the present has 
been to "carry on" and to bridge the gap of un- 
avoidable delays while the army is preparing. 

To prove that this "war of compassion" is no 
idle phrase, let me illustrate with one dramatic 
instance. When the Italian line broke under the 
pressure of Hun artillery and propaganda, the 
American Red Cross sent representatives forward 
to inaugurate relief work for the 700,000 refu- 
gees, who were pouring southward from the 
Friuti and Veneto, homeless, hungry, possessing 



112 OUT TO WIN 

nothing but misfortune, spreading despair and 
panic every step of the journey. Their bodies 
must be cared for — that was evident ; it would be 
easy for them to carry disease throughout Italy. 
But the disease of their minds was an even greater 
danger; if their demoralisation were not checked, 
it would inevitably prove contagious. 

The first two representatives of the American 
Red Cross arrived in Rome on November 5th, 
with a quarter of a million dollars at their dis- 
posal. That night they had a soup-kitchen going 
and fed 400 people. Their first day's work is the 
record of an amazing spurt of energy. In that 
first day they sent money for relief to every 
American Consul in the districts affected. They 
mobilised the American colony in Rome and ar- 
ranged by wire for similar organisations to be 
formed throughout the length and breadth of 
Italy, wherever they could lay hands on an Amer- 
ican. On all principal junction points through 
which the refugees would pass, soup-kitchens 
were installed and clothes were purchased and 
ready to be distributed as the trains pulled into 
the stations. They were badly needed, for the 
passengers had endured all the rigours of the re- 
treat with the soldiers. They had been under 
shell and machine-gun fire. They had been 
bombed by aeroplanes. No horror of warfare 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 113 

had been spared them. Their clothes were ver- 
minous with weeks of wearing. They were 
packed Hke cattle. Babies born on the journey 
were wrapped in newspapers. There were in- 
stances of officers taking off their shirts that the 
little bodies should not go naked. A telegram 
was at once despatched to Paris for food and 
clothes and hospital supplies. Twenty-four cars 
came through within a week, despite the unusual 
military traffic. This ends the list of what was 
accomplished by two men in one day. 

The great thing was to make the demoralised 
Italians feel that America was on the spot and 
helping them. The sending of troops could not 
have roused their fighting spirit. They were sick 
of fighting. What they needed was the assurance 
that the world was not wholly brutal — that there 
was some one who was merciful, who did not con- 
demn and who was moved by their sorrow. This 
assurance the prompt action of the American Red 
Cross gave. It restored in the affirmative with 
mercy, precisely the quality which Hun fury and 
propaganda had destroyed with lies. It restored 
to them their belief in the nobility of mankind, 
out of which belief grows all true courage. 

As the work progressed, it branched out on a 
much larger scale, embracing civilian, military 
and child-welfare activities. In the month of 



114 OUT TO WIN 

November upward of half a million lire were 
placed in the hands of American consuls for dis- 
tribution. One million lire were contributed for 
the benefit of soldiers' families. A permanent 
headquarters was established with trained busi- 
ness men and men who had had experience under 
Hoover in Belgium in charge of its departments. 
Over loo hospitals and two principal magazines 
of hospital stores had been lost in the retreat. 
The American Red Cross made up this deficiency 
by supplying the bedding for no less than 3,000 
beds. Five weeks after the first two representa- 
tives had reached Rome three complete ambulance 
sections, each section being made up of 20 am- 
bulances, a staff car, a kitchen trailer and 33 
men, were turned over to the Italian Medical 
Service of the third Army. By the first week in 
December the stream of refugees had practically 
stopped. Italy had been made to realise that she 
was not fighting alone; her morale had returned 
to her. This work, which had been initially un- 
dertaken from purely altruistic motives, had 
proved to possess a value of the highest military 
importance — an importance of the spirit utterly 
out of proportion to the money and labour ex- 
pended. Magnanimity arouses magnanimity. In 
this case it revived the flame of Garibaldi which 
had all but died. It achieved a strategic victorj' 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 115 

of the soul which no amount of military assist- 
ance could have accomplished. The victory of 
the American Red Cross on the Italian Front 
is all the more significant since it was not until 
months later that Congress declared war on 
Austria. 

The campaign which the American Red Cross 
is waging in every country in which it operates, 
is frankly an "out to win" campaign. To win the 
war is its one and only object. What the army 
does for the courage of the body, the Red Cross 
does for the courage of the mind. It builds up 
the hearts and hopes of people who in three and 
a half years have grown numb. It restores the 
human touch to their lives and, with it, the spir- 
itual horizon. Its business, while the army is still 
preparing, is to bring home to the Allies in every 
possible way the fact that America, with her 
hundred and ten millions of population, is in the 
war with them, eager to play the game, anxious 
to sacrifice as they have sacrificed, to give her 
man-power and resources as they have done, 
until justice has been established for every man 
and nation. 

It is necessary to lay stress on this programme 
since it differs gjeatly from the popular concep- 
tion of the functions of the Red Cross in the 
battle area. It was on the field of Solferino in 



ii6 OUT TO WIN 

1859, that Henri Diinant went out before the fury 
had spent itself to tend the wounded. It was 
here that he was fired with his great ambition to 
found a non-combatant service, which should 
recognise no enemies and be friends with every 
army. His ambition was reaHsed when in 1864 
the Conference at Geneva chose the Swiss flag, re- 
versed, as its emblem — a red cross on a field of 
white — and laid the foundations for those inter- 
national understandings which have since formed 
for all combatants, except the Hun in this present 
warfare, the protective law for the sick and 
wounded. The original purpose of the Red Cross 
still fills the imagination of the masses to the ex- 
clusion of all else that it is doing. Directly the 
term "Red Cross" is mentioned the picture that 
forms in most men's minds is of ambulances 
galloping through the thick of battle-smoke and 
of devoted stretcher-bearers who brave danger 
not to kill, but in order that they may save lives. 

This war has changed all that. To-day the Red 
Cross has to minister to not the wounded of 
armies only, but to the wounded of nations. In 
a country like France, with trenches dug the en- 
tire length of her eastern frontier and vast terri- 
tories from which the entire population has been 
evacuated, the wounds of her armies are small in 
comparison with the wounds, bodily and mental, 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 117 

of her civil population — wounds which are the 
outcome of over three years of privation. When 
the civil population of any country has lost its 
pluck, no matter how splendid the spirit of its 
soldiers, its armies become paralysed. The civil- 
ians can commence peace negotiations behind the 
backs of their men in the trenches. They can in- 
sist on peace by refusing to send them ammuni- 
tion and supplies. As a matter of fact the morale 
of the soldiers varies directly with the morale of 
the civilians for whom they fight. Behind every 
soldier stand a woman and a group of chil- 
dren. Their safety is his inspiration. If they are 
neglected, his sacrifice is belittled. If they beg 
that he should lay down his arms, his determina- 
tion is weakened. It is therefore a vital neces- 
sity, quite apart from the humanitarian aspect, 
that the wounds of the civilians of belligerent 
countries should be cared for. If the civilians 
are allowed to become disheartened and cowardly, 
the heroic ideal of their fighting-men is jeopard- 
ised. This fact has been recognised by the Red 
Cross Societies of all countries in the present 
war; a large part of their energies has been de- 
voted to social and relief work of a civil nature. 
Even in their purely military departments, the 
comfort of the troops claims quite as much atten- 
tion as their medical treatment and hospitalisa- 



ii8 OUT TO WIN 

tion. As a matter of fact, the actual carrying- of 
the wounded out of the trenches to the compara- 
tive safety of the dressing station is usually done 
by combatants. A man has to live continually 
under shell-fire to acquire the immunity to fear 
which passes for courage. The bravest man is 
likely to get "jumpy," if he only faces up to a 
bombardment occasionally. There are other rea- 
sons why combatants should do the stretcher- 
bearing which do not need elaborating. The 
combatants have an expert knowledge of their 
own particular frontage; they are "wise" to the 
barraged areas; they are "up front" and con- 
tinually coming and going, so it is often an econ- 
omy of man-power for them to attend to their 
own wounded in the initial stages; they are the 
nearest to a comrade when he falls and all carry 
the necessary first-aid dressings; the emblem of 
the Red Cross has proved to be only a slight pro- 
tection, as the Hun is quite likely not to respect 
it. What I am driving at is that the Red Cross 
has had to adapt itself to the new conditions of 
modern warfare, so that very many of its most 
important present-day functions are totally dif- 
ferent from what popular fancy imagines. 

The American Red Cross has its French Head- 
quarters in a famous gambling club in the Place 
de la Concorde. It is somewhat strange to pass 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 119 

through these rooms where rakes once flung away 
fortunes, and to find them industriously orderly 
with the conscience of an imported nation. By 
far the larger part of the staff are business 
men of the Wall Street type — not at all the kind 
who have been accustomed to sentimentalise over 
philanthropy. There is also a sprinkling of 
trained social workers, clergy, journalists, and 
imiversity professors. The medical profession is 
represented by some of the leading specialists of 
the States, but at Headquarters they are distinctly 
in the minority. The purely medical work of 
the American Red Cross forms only a part of its 
total activities. The men at the head of affairs 
are bankers, merchants, presidents of corpora- 
tions — men who have been trained to think in mil- 
lions and to visualise broad areas. Girls are very 
much in evidence. They are usually volunteers, 
drawn from all classes, who ofifered their services 
to do anything that would help. To-day they are 
typists, secretaries, stenographers, nurses. 

The organisation is divided into three main 
departments : the department of military affairs, 
of civil affairs and of administration. Under 
these departments come a variety of bureaus : the 
bureau of rehabilitation and reconstruction ; of 
the care and prevention of tuberculosis; of needy 
children and infant mortality; of refugees and 



I20 OUT TO WIN 

relief; of the re-education of the French mutiles; 
of suppHes ; of the rolHng canteens for the French 
armies ; of the U. S. Army Division ; of the Mili- 
tary, Medical and Surgical Division, etc. They 
are too numerous to mention in detail. The best 
way I can convey the picture of immense ac- 
complishment is to describe what I actually saw 
in the field of operations. 

The first place I will take you to is Evian, be- 
cause here you see the tragedy and need of 
France as embodied in individuals. Evian-les- 
Bains is on Lake Geneva, looking out across the 
water to Switzerland. It is the first point of call 
across the French frontier for the repatries re- 
turning from their German bondage. When the 
Boche first swept down on the northern provinces 
he pushed the French civilian population behind 
him. He has since kept them working for him 
as serfs, labouring in the captured coal-mines, 
digging his various lines of defences, setting up 
wire-entanglements, etc. Apart from the testi- 
mony of repatriated French civilians, I myself 
have seen messages addressed by Frenchmen to 
their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks 
of Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug- 
outs would be captured, and the messages passed 
on by a soldier of the Allies. After three and a 
half years of enforced labour, many of these cap- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 121 

tured civilians are worked out. To the Boche, 
with his ever-increasing food-shortage, they rep- 
resent useless mouths. Instead of filling them 
he is driving their owners back, broken and use- 
less, by way of Switzerland. To him human 
beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof 
like cattle. No spiritual values enter into the bar- 
gain. When the body is exhausted it is sent to 
the knacker's, as though it belonged to a worn-out 
horse. The entire attitude is materialistic and 
degrading. Evian-les-Bains, the once gay gam- 
bling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the 
knacker's shop for French civilians exhausted by 
their German servitude. The Hun shoves them 
across the border at the rate of about 1,300 a day. 
From the start I have always felt that this war 
was a crusade; what I saw at Evian made me 
additionally certain. When I was in the trenches 
I never had any hatred of the Boche. Probably 
I shall lose my hatred in pity for him when I get 
to the Front again — but for the present I hate 
him. It's here in France that one sees what a 
vileness he has created in the children's and 
women's lives. 

I took the night train down from Paris. Early 
in the morning I woke up to find myself in the 
gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic 
Italian-looking settings soaring on every side. At 



122 OUT TO WIN 

noon we reached Lake Geneva, lying slate-col- 
oured and sombre beneath a wintry sky. That 
afternoon I saw the train of repatrics arrive. 

I was on the platform when the train pulled 
into the station. It might have been a funeral 
cortege, only there was a horrible difference: 
the corpses pretended to be alive. The Amer- 
ican Ambulance men were there in force. They 
climbed into the carriages and commenced to help 
the infirm to alight. The exiles were all so stiff 
with travel that they could scarcely move at first. 
The windows of the train were grey with faces. 
Such faces ! All of them old, even the little chil- 
dren's. The Boche makes a present to France of 
only such human wreckage as is unuseful for his 
purposes. He is an acute man of business. The 
convoy consisted of two classes of persons — the 
very ancient and the very juvenile. You can't 
set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you can't 
make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten. The 
only boys were of the mal-nourished variety. 
Men, women and children — they all had the ap- 
pearance of being half-witted. 

They were terribly pathetic. As I watched 
them I tried to picture to myself what three and 
a half long years of captivity must have meant. 
How often they must have dreamt of the exalta- 
tion of this day — and now that it had arrived. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 123 

they were not exalted. They had the look of 
people so spiritually benumbed that they would 
never know despair or exaltation again. They 
had a broken look ; their shoulders were crushed 
and their skirts bedraggled. Many of them car- 
ried babies — pretty little beggars with flaxen hair. 
It wasn't difficult to guess their parentage. 

As they were herded on the platform a low, 
strangled kind of moaning went up. I watched 
individual lips to see where the sound came from. 
I caught no movement. The noise was the sigh- 
ing of tired animals. Every one had some treas- 
ured possession. Here was an old man with 
an alarm-clock; there an aged woman with an 
empty bird-cage. A boy carried half-a-dozen 
sauce-pans strung together. Another had a 
spare pair of patched boots under his arm. Quite 
a lot of them clutched a bundle of umbrellas. 
I found myself reflecting tliat these were the 
remnants of families who had been robbed of 
everything that they valued in the world. What- 
ever they had saved from the ruin ought to rep- 
resent the possession which had claimed most of 

their affections, and yet ! What did an 

alarm-clock, an empty bird-cage, a pair of 
patched boots, a string of sauce-pans, a bundle 
of ragged umbrellas signify in any life? Wha> 



124 OUT TO WIN 

litter poverty, if these were the best that they 
could save! 

There was a band on the platform, consisting 
mainly of bugles and drums, to welcome them. 
The leader is reputed to be the laziest man in the 
French Army. It is said that they tried him at 
everything and then, in despair, sent him to 
Evian to drum forgotten happiness into the bones 
of repatries. Whatever his former military record, 
he now does his utmost to impersonate the de- 
fiant and impassioned soul of France. His mous- 
taches are curled fiercely. His brows are heavy 
as thunderclouds. When he drums, the veins 
swell out in his neck with the violence of his 
energy. 

Suddenly, with an ominous preliminary rum- 
ble, the band struck up the Marseillaise. You 
should have seen the change in this crowd of 
corpses. You must remember that these people 
had been so long accustomed to lies and snares 
that it would probably take days to persuade 
them that they were actually safe home in France. 

As the battle-song for which they had suffered 
shook the air their lips rustled like leaves. There 
was hardly any sound — only a hoarse whisper. 
Then, all of a sudden, words came — an inarticu- 
late, sobbing commotion. Tears blinded the eyes 
of every spectator, even those who had witnessed 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 125 

similar scenes often ; we were crying because the 
singing was so little human. 

"Vive la France! Vive la France!" They 
waved flags — not the tri-colour, but flags which 
had been given them in Switzerland. They clung 
together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, 
children with peaked faces, men unhappy and un- 
shaven. A woman caught sight of my uniform. 
"Vive I'Angleterre," she cried, and they all came 
stumbling forward to embrace me. It was hor- 
rible. They creaked like automatons. They ges- 
tured and mouthed, but the soul had been crushed 
out of their eyes. You don't need any proofs 
of Hun atrocities; the proofs are to be seen at 
Evian. There are no severed hands, no cruci- 
fied bodies ; only hearts that have been mutilated. 
Sorrow is at its saddest when it cannot even con- 
trive to appear dignified. There is no dignity 
about the repatries at Evian, with their absurd 
umbrellas, sauce-pans, patched-boots, alarm- 
clocks and bird-cages. They do not appeal to 
one as sacrificed patriots. There is no nobility 
in their vacant stare. They create a cold feel- 
ing of bodily decay — only it is the spirit that is 
dead and gangrenous. 

There is a blasphemous story by Leonid An- 
dreyev, which recounts the bitterness of the after 
years of Lazarus and the mischief Christ wrought 



126 OUT TO WIN 

in recalling him from the grave. After his un- 
natural return to life there was a blueness as of 
putrescence beneath his pallor; an iciness to his 
touch ; a choking silence in his presence ; a horror 
in his gaze, as if he were remembering his three 
days in the sepulchre — as if forbidden knowledge 
groped behind his eyes. He rarely looked at any 
one; there were none who courted his glance, 
who did not creep away to die. The terror of 
his fame spread beyond Bethany. Rome heard 
of him, and at that safe distance laughed. It 
did not laugh after Caesar Augustus had sent for 
him. Caesar Augustus was a god upon earth; 
he could not die. But when he had questioned 
Lazarus, peeped through the windows of his eyes, 
and read what lay hidden in that forbidden mem- 
ory, he commanded that red-hot irons should 
quench such sight for ever. From Rome Lazarus 
groped his way back to Palestine and there, long 
years after his Saviour had been crucified, con- 
tinued to stumble through his own particular 
Gethsemane of blindness. I thought of that story 
in the presence of this crowd, which carried 
with it the taint of the grave. 

But the band was still playing the Marseillaise 
— over and over it played it. With each repe- 
tition it was as though these people, three years 
dead, made another effort to cast aside their 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 127 

shrouds. Little by little something was happen- 
ing — something wonderful. Backs were straight- 
ening; skirts were being caught up; resolution 
was rippling from face to face — it passed and 
re-passed with each new roll of the drums. The 
hoarse cries and moaning with which we had 
commenced were gradually transforming them- 
selves into singing. 

There were some who were too weak to walk ; 
these were carried by the American Red Cross 
men into the waiting ambulances. The remain- 
der were marshalled into a disorderly procession 
and led out of the station by the band. 

We were moving down the hill to the palaces 
beside the lake — the palaces to which all France 
used to troop for pleasure. We moved soddenly 
at first, shuffling in our steps. But the drums 
were still rolling out their defiance and the bugles 
were still blowing. The laziest man in the French 
Army was doing his utmost to belie his record. 
The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music. 
They began to dance. Were there ever feet less 
suited to dancing? That they should dance was 
the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in 
creases about the ankles. Women commenced to 
jig their Boche babies in their arms ; consumptive 
men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and 
grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was 



128 OUT TO WIN 

damnable. It was a burlesque. It pierced the 
heart. What right had the Boche to leave these 
people so comic after he had squeezed the life- 
blood out of them? 

All his insults to humanity became suddenly 
typified in these five hundred jumping tatter- 
demalions — the way in which he had plundered 
the world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency. 
I felt an anger which battlefields had never 
aroused, where men moulder above ground and 
become unsightly beneath the open sky. The 
slain of battlefields were at least motionless ; they 
did not gape and grin at you with the dreadful 
humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the 
Galilean passion which animates every Red Cross 
worker at Evian: the agony to do something 
to make these murdered people live again. 

This last convoy came, I discovered, from a 
city behind the Boche lines against which last 
summer I had often directed fire. It was full 
in sight from my observing station. I had 
watched the very houses in which these people, 
who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For 
three and a half years these women's bodies had 
been at the Hun's mercy. I tried to bring the 
truth home to myself. Their men and young 
girls had been left behind. They themselves had 
been flung back on overburdened France only be- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 129 

cause they were no longer serviceable. They 
were returning actually penniless, though seem- 
ingly with money. The thrifty German makes 
a practice of seizing all the good redeemable 
French money of the repatries before he lets them 
escape him, giving them in exchange worthless 
paper stuff of his own manufacture, which has 
no security behind it and is therefore not nego- 
tiable. 

We came to the Casino, where endless for- 
malities were necessary. First of all in the big 
hall, formerly devoted to gambling, the repatries 
were fed at long tables. As I passed, odd groups 
seeing my uniform, hurriedly dropped whatever 
they were doing and, removing their caps, stood 
humbly at attention. There was fear in their 
promptness. Where they came from an officer 
exacted respect with the flat of his sword. What 
a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity! It was 
as though the occupants of a morgue had be- 
come galvanised and had temporarily risen from 
their slabs. 

The band had been augmented by trumpets. 
It took its place in the gallery and deluged the 
hall with patriotic fervour. An old man climbed 
on a table and yelled, "Vive la France!" But 
they had grown tired of shouting; they soon 
grew tired. The cry was taken up faintly and 



I30 OUT TO WIN 

soon exhausted itself. Nothing held their atten- 
tion for long. Most of them sat hunched up 
and inert, weakly crying. They were not beau- 
tiful. They were not like our men who die in 
battle. They were animated memories of horror. 
"What lies before us? What lies before us?" 
That was the question that their silence asked 
perpetually. Some of them had husbands with 
the French army; others had sweethearts. 
What would those men say to the flaxen-haired 
babies who nestled against the women's breasts? 
And the sin was not theirs — they were such tired, 
pretty mites. "What lies before us?" The ba- 
bies, too, might well have asked that question. 
Do you wonder that I at last began to share the 
Frenchman's hatred for the Boche? 

An extraordinary person in a white tie, top 
hat and evening dress entered. He looked like 
a cross between Mr, Gerard's description of him- 
self in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently 
expected his advent to cause a profound sensa- 
tion. I found out why : he was the official wel- 
comer to Evian. Twice a day, for an infinity 
of days, he had entered in solemn fashion, faced 
the same tragic assembly, made the same fiery 
oration, gained applause at the climax of the 
same rounded periods and allowed his voice to 
break in the same rightly timed places. Having 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 131 

kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards 
his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his 
neck, removed his coat, felt his throat to see 
whether it was in good condition, swelled out his 
chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned 
by the broad ribbon of his office, then let loose 
the painter of his emotion and slipped off into 
the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence. With 
all his disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he 
held it in his right hand with the brim pressed 
against his thigh, very much in the manner of a 
showman at a circus. It contributed largely to 
the opulence of his gestures. 

He always seemed to have concluded and was 
always starting up afresh, as if in reluctant re- 
sponse to spectral clapping. He called upon the 
repatries never to forget the crimes that had been 
wrought against them— to spread abroad the fire 
of their indignation, the story of their ravished 
womanhood and broken families all over France. 
They watched him leaden-eyed and wept softly. 
To forget, to forget, that was all that they wanted 
— to blot out all the past. This man with the 
top-hat and the evening-dress, he hadn't suffered 
— how could he understand ? They didn't want 
to remember; with those flaxed-haired children 
against their breasts the one boon they craved 



132 OUT TO WIN 

was forget fulness. And so they cowered and 
wept softly. It was intolerable. 

And now the formalities commenced. They all 
had to be medically examined. Questions of 
every description were asked them. They were 
drifted from bureau to bureau where people sat 
filling up official blanks. The Americans see to 
the children. They come from living in cellars, 
from conditions which are insanitary, from cities 
in the army zones where they were underfed. 
The fear is that they may spread contagion all 
over France. When infectious cases are found 
the remnants of families have to be broken up 
afresh. The mothers collapse on benches sobbing 
their hearts out as their children are led away. 
For three and a half years everything they have 
loved has been led away — how can they believe 
that these Americans mean only mercy? 

From three to four hours are spent in com- 
pleting all these necessary investigations. Before 
the repatrics are conducted to their billets, all 
their clothes have to be disinfected and every one 
has to be bathed. The poor people are utterly 
worn out by the end of it — they have already 
done a continuous four days' journey in cramped 
trains. Before being sent to France they have 
been living for from two to three weeks in Bel- 
gium. The Hun always sends the repatries to 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 133 

Belgium for a few weeks before returning them. 
The reason for this is that they for the most part 
come from the army zones, and a few weeks will 
make any information they possess out of date. 
Another reason is that food is more plentiful in 
Belgium, thanks to the Allies' Relief Commission. 
These people have been kept alive on sugar-beets 
for the past few months, so it is as well to feed 
them at the Allies' expense for a little while, in 
order that they may create a better impression 
when they return to France. The American doc- 
tors pointed out to me the pulpy flesh of the 
children and the distended stomachs which, to 
the unpractised eye, seemed a sign of over- 
nourishment. "Wind and water," they said; 
"that's all these children are. They've no 
stamina. Sugar-beets are the most economic 
means of just keeping the body and the soul 
together." 

The lights are going out in the Casino. It is 
the hour when, in the old days, life would be be- 
coming most feverish about the gaming tables. 
In little forlorn groups the repatries are being 
conducted to their temporary quarters in the 
town. To-morrow morning before it is light, an- 
other train-load will arrive, the band will again 
play the Marseillaise, the American Red Cross 
workers will again be in attendance, the gentle- 



134 OUT TO WIN 

man in the tof^hat and white-tie will again make 
his fiery oration of welcome, his audience will 
again pay no attention but will weep softly — the 
tediously heart-rending scene will be rehearsed 
throughout in every detail by an entirely new 
batch of actors. Twice a day, summer and win- 
ter, the same tragedy is enacted at Evian. It is 
a continuous, never-ending performance. 

Poor people! These whom I have seen, if 
they have no friends to claim them, will re-start 
their journey to some strange department on 
which they will be billeted as paupers. Here 
again the American Red Cross is doing good 
work, for it sends one of its representatives ahead 
to see that proper preparations have l^een made 
for their reception. After they have reached 
their destination, it looks them up from time to 
time to make sure that they are being well cared 
for. 

If one wants to picture the case of the repatrie 
in its true misery, all he needs to do is to con- 
vert it into terms of his own mother or grand- 
mother. She has lived all her life in the neigh- 
bourhood of Vimy, let us say. She was married 
there and it was there that she bore all her chil- 
dren. She and her husband have saved money; 
they are substantial people now and need not fear 
the future. Their sons are gaining their own 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 135 

living; one daughter is married, the others are 
arriving at the marriageable age. One day the 
Hun sweeps down on them. The sons escape to 
join the French army ; the girls and their parents 
stay behind to guard their property. They are 
immediately evacuated from Vimy and sent to 
some city, such as Drocourt, further behind the 
Hun front-line. Here they are gradually robbed 
of all their possessions. At the beginning all their 
gold is confiscated ; later even the mattresses upon 
their beds are requisitioned. For three and a half 
years they are subjected to both big and petty 
tyrannies, till their spirits are so broken that 
fear becomes their predominant emotion. The 
father is led away to work in the mines. One 
by one the daughters are commandeered and sent 
off into the heart of Germany, where it will be no 
one's business to guard their virtue. At last the 
mother is left with only her youngest child. Of 
her sons who are fighting with the French armies 
she has no knowledge, whether they are living or 
dead. Then one day it is decided by her captors 
that they have no further use for her. They part 
her from her last remaining child and pack her 
off by way of Belgium and Switzerland back to 
her own country. She arrives at Evian penni- 
less and half-witted with the terror of her sor- 
row. There is no one to claim her; the part of 



136 OUT TO WIN 

France that knew her is all behind the German 
lines. A label is tied to her, as if she was a piece 
of baggage, and she is shipped off to Avignon, let 
us say. She has never been in the South before ; 
it is a foreign country to her. Poverty and ad- 
versity have broken her pride; she has nothing 
left that will command respect. There is noth- 
ing left in life to which she can fasten her affec- 
tions. Such utter forlornness is never a welcome 
sight. Is it to be wondered at that the strangers 
to whom she is sent are not always glad to see 
her? Is it to be wondered at that, after her 
repatriation, she often wilts and dies? Her sor- 
row has the appearance of degradation. Wher- 
ever she goes, she is a threat and a peril to the 
fighting morale of the civilian population. Yet 
in her pre-war kindliness and security she might 
have been your mother or mine. 

The American Red Cross, by maintaining con- 
tact with such people, is keeping them reminded 
that they are not utterly deserted — that the whole 
of civilised humanity cares tremendously what 
becomes of them and is anxious to lighten the 
load of their sacrifice. 

I have before me a pile of sworn depositions, 
made by exiles returned from the invaded terri- 
tories. They are separately numbered and dated ; 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 137 

each bears the name of the region or town from 
which the repatrie came. Here are a few extracts 
which, when pieced together, form a picture of 
the Hfe of captured French civilians behind the 
German Hues. I have carefully avoided glaring 
atrocities. Atrocities are as a rule isolated in- 
stances, due to isolated causes. They occur, but 
they are not typical of the situation. The real 
Hun atrocity is the attitude towards life which 
calls chivalry sentiment, fair-play a waste of 
opportunity and ruthlessness strength. This at- 
titude is all summed up in the one word Prussian- 
ism. The repatries have been Prussianised out 
of their wholesome joy and belief in life; it is 
this that makes them the walking accusations 
that they are to-day. In the following deposi- 
tions they give some glimpses of the calculated 
processes by which their happiness has been mur- 
dered. 

"Lately copper, tin, and zinc have been re- 
moved in the factories and amongst the traders, 
and quite recently in private houses. For all 
these requisitions the Gemians gave Requisition 
Bonds, but private individuals who received them 
never got paid the money. To force men to work 
'voluntarily' and sign contracts the Germans em- 
ployed the following means : the Germans gave 



138 OUT TO WIN 

these men nothing to eat, but authorised their 
famiHes to send them parcels ; these parcels once 
in the hands of the Germans are shown to these 
unhappy men and are not handed over until they 
have signed. About a week ago young boys from 
the age of fourteen who had come back from the 
Ardennes had to present themselves at the Kdr 
to be registered anew; a number of the young 
people work in the sawmills, etc. ; some have died 
of privation and fatigue." 

"A week after Easter this year the population 
of Lille was warned by poster that all must be 
ready to leave the town. At three o'clock in 
the morning private houses were invaded by the 
German soldiers ; they sorted out women and 
girls who were to be deported. There then took 
place scandalous scenes : young girls belonging 
to the most worthy families in the town had to 
pass medical visits even with the speculum and 
had to endure most atrocious physical and moral 
suffering. These young girls were segregated 
like beasts anywhere in the rooms of the town 
halls and schoolhouses, and were mingled with 
the dregs of the population." 

"For a certain time the Germans did not requi- 
sition milk and allowed it to be sold, but now this 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 139 

is forbidden under a fine of 1,000 marks or three 
months' imprisonment. Recently Wignehies 
was fined 100,000 frcs., and as the whole of this 
sum was not paid the Germans inflicted punish- 
ment as follows : Several inhabitants of Wigne- 
hies were caught in the act of disobeying by the 
gendarmes and were struck, and bitten by the 
police dogs of the gendarmes because they re- 
fused to denounce the sellers. . . . Brutal treat- 
ment is due more to the gendarmes than to the 
soldiers. About six weeks ago Marceau Horlet 
of Wignehies was found, on a search by the 
gendarmes, to have a piece of meat in his pos- 
session. He was brutally beaten by them and 
bitten by the police dogs because he refused to 
say who had given it to him. In 19 15, the youth 
Remy Vallei of Wignehies, age 15, was walking 
in the street after 6-9 p.m., which was forbidden; 
he was seen by two gendarmes and ran away. He 
was straightway killed, receiving six revolver bul- 
lets in his body." 

"At PiGNicouRT during the Champagne of- 
fensive the village was bombarded by the French, 
who were attempting to destroy the railway 
lines and bridges. The Commandant, by name 
Krama, of the Kdr, forced men and youths, and 
even women, to fill up the holes made by the 



140 OUT TO WIN 

bombardment during- the action. A German gen- 
eral passed and reprimanded them on the ground 
that there was danger to the civilians ; they were 
withdrawn for the moment, but sent back as soon 
as the general had left." 

"As regards the Hispano-American revictual- 
ling, it may be said with truth that without this 
the population of Northern France would have 
died of hunger, for the Germans considered 
themselves liberated from any responsibility. 
During the first months of the war before this 
Committee started, the Germans put up posters 
saying that the Allies were trying to starve Ger- 
many, who in turn was not obliged to feed the 
invaded territory. . , . When informant (who 
is from St. Quentin) left at the general evacu- 
ation of this town, no requisition bonds were 
given for household goods. As the inhabitants 
left, their furniture was loaded on to motor lor- 
ries and taken to the station, whence it was 
sent by special train to Germany. This shows 
clearly that requisition bonds issued by the Ger- 
mans show only the small proportion of what 
has been suffered by the inhabitants. . , . In- 
formant was the witness of the execution of 
French civilians whose only fault was either to 
hide arms or pigeons : several who had commit- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 141 

ted these infractions of requisitions were shot, 
and the Germans announced the fact by poster 
of a blood-red colour. In other cases the men 
shot were British prisoners who had dressed in 
civil clothes on the arrival of the Germans. In- 
formant had a long conversation with one of 
them before his execution. He told informant 
how he had been unable to leave St. Ouentin, 
viz., by the 28th August. Some passers-by of- 
fered to hide him. It appears that, through his 
ignorance of the French language, he was una- 
ware that the Germans threatened execution to 
all men found after a certain date. He was dis- 
covered and condemned to death for espionage. 
It is obvious, as the man himself said, that one 
could not imagine a man acting as a spy without 
knowing either the language of the country or 
that of the enemy." 

"Before the evacuation of the population the 
Germans chose those who were to remain as 
civilian workers, viz., 120 men from 15 to 60. On 
the very day of the evacuation they kept back at 
the station 2^ others. These men are now at 
Cantin or SoMAiN, where they are employed on 
the roads or looking after munitions in the Arras 
group. The others at Decpiy and Guesnin are 
in the Vimy group and are making pill-boxes or 



142 OUT TO WIN 

railway lines. A certain number of these workers 
refused to carry out the work ordered, and as 
punishment during the summer were tied to chairs 
and exposed bare-headed to the full blaze of the 
sun. They were often threatened to be shot." 

"After the bombardment of Lille the Ger- 
mans entered Exnetieres on the 12th October, 
19 14. On the next Monday 200 Uhlans occu- 
pied the Commune, and houses and haystacks 
were burned. ... At Lomme every one was 
forced to work : the Saxon Kdnt. Schoper an- 
nounced that all women who did not obey within 
24 hours would be interned : all the women 
obeyed. They were employed in the making 
of osier-revetement two metres high for the 
trenches. The men were forced to put up 
barbed wire near Fort Denglas, two kltrs. from 
the front. A few days after the evacuation of 
Ennetieres the Uhlans shot a youth, Jean 
Leclercq, age 17, son of the gardener of Count 
D'Hespel, simply because they had found a tele- 
phone wire in the courtyard of the chateau." 

"Informant, who has lost his right arm, was 
nevertheless forced to work for the Germans, 
notably to unload coal and to work on the roads. 
He had with him males from 13 to 60. Hav- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 143 

ing objected because of his lost arm, he was 
threatened with imprisonment. At Lomme 
squads of workers were given the work of put- 
ting up barbed wire ; women were forced to make 
sand bags. In cases of refusal on either side 
the Kdr. inflicted four or five weeks' imprison- 
ment, to say nothing of blows with sticks in- 
flicted by the soldiers. In spring 191 7 a number 
of men were sent from Lomme to the Beauvin- 
Provins region to work on defences. . . . Those 
who refused to sign were threatened and struck 
with the butts of rifles, and left in cellars some- 
times filled with water during bombardments. 
Several of them came back seriously ill from 
privation." 

"Young girls are separated from their moth- 
ers; there are levies made at every moment. 
Sometimes these young girls- have barely a few 
hours before the moment of departure. . . . 
Several young girls have written to say that they 
are very unhappy and that they sleep in camps 
amongst girls of low class and condition." 

"For a long time past women have been forced 
to work as road labourers. These work in the 
quarries and transport wood cut down by the 
men in the mountain forest. A number of 



144 OUT TO WIN 

women and young girls have been removed from 
their families and sent in the direction of Rheims 
and Rethel, where it is said (although this can- 
not be confirmed) that they are employed in 
aerodromes." 

These extracts should serve to explain the 
mental and physical depression of the return- 
ing exiles. They have been bullied out of the 
desire to live and out of all possession of either 
their bodies or their souls. They have been 
treated like cattle, and as cattle they have come 
to regard themselves. Lazaruses — that's what 
they are! The unmerciful Boche, having killed 
and buried them, drags them out from the tomb 
and compels them to go through the antics of 
life. Le Gallienne's poem comes to my mind : 

"Loud mockers in the angry street 
Say Christ is crucified again — 
Twice pierced those gospel-bearing feet, 
Twice broken that great heart in vain. . . ." 

That is all true at Evian. But when I see the 
American men and girls, leaning over the Boche 
babies in their cots and living their hearts into 
the hands and feet of the spiritually maimed, the 
last two lines of the poem become true for me: 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 145 

"I hear, and to myself I say, 

'Why, Christ walks with me every day.' " 

The work of the American Red Cross at Evian 
is largely devoted to children. It provides all 
the ambulance transportation for the repatries, 
to and from the station. American doctors and 
nurses do all the examining of the children at 
the Casino. On an average, four hundred pass 
through their hands daily. The throat, nose, 
teeth, glands and skin of each child are inspected. 
If the child is suspected or attacked by any dis- 
ease, it is immediately segregated and sent to 
the American hospital. If the infection is only 
local or necessitates further examination, the 
child and its family are summoned to present 
themselves at the American dispensary next day. 
Every precaution is employed to prevent the 
spread of infection — particularly the infection of 
tuberculosis. Evian is the gateway from Ger- 
many through which disease and death may be 
carried to the furthest limits of France. Very 
few of the repatries are really healthy. It would 
be a wonder if they were after the privations 
through which they have passed. All of them 
are weakened in vitality and broken down in 
stamina. Many of them have no homes to go 
to and have to be sent to departments of the inte- 



146 OUT TO WIN 

rior and the south. If they were sent in an 
unhealthy condition, it would mean the spread 
of epidemics. 

The Red Cross has a large children's hospital 
at Evian in the villas and buildings of the Hotel 
Chatelet. This hospital deals with the contagious 
cases. It has others, especially one at the Chateau 
des Halles, thirty kilometres from Lyons, which 
take the devitalised, convalescent and tubercular 
cases. The Chateau des Halles is a splendidly 
built modern building, arranged in an ideal way 
for hospital use. It stands at the head of a 
valley, with an all day sun exposure and large 
grounds. Close to the Chateau are a number of 
small villages in which it is possible to lodge the 
repatries in families. This is an important part 
of the repatrie's problem, as after their many 
partings they fight fiercely against any further 
separations. One of the chief reasons for hav- 
ing the Convalescent Hospital out in the country 
is that families can be quartered in the villages 
and so kept together. 

The pathetic hunger of these people for one 
another after they have been so long divided, 
was illustrated for me on my return journey to 
Paris. A man of the tradesman class had been to 
Evian to meet his wife and his boy of about 
eleven. They were among the lucky ones, for 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 147 

they had a home to go to. He was not prepos- 
sessing in appearance. He had a weak face, lined 
with anxiety, broken teeth and limp hair. His 
wife, as so often happens in French marriages, 
had evidently been the manageress. She was un- 
beautiful in rusty black; her clothes were the ill- 
assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes 
from Germany. Her eyes were shifty with the 
habit of fear and sunken with the weariness of 
crying. The boy was a bright little fellow, full 
of defiance and anecdotes of his recent captors. 

When I entered the carriage, they were sit- 
ting huddled together — the man in the middle, 
with an arm about either of them. He kept 
pressing them to him., kissing them by turn in 
a spasmodic unrestrained fashion, as if he still 
feared that he might lose them and could not 
convince himself of the happy truth that they 
were once again together. The woman did not 
respond to his embraces ; she seemed indifferent 
to him, indifferent to life, indifferent to any pros- 
pects. The boy seemed fond of his father, but 
embarrassed by his starved demonstrativeness. 

I listened to their conversation. The man's 
talk was all of the future — what splendid things 
he would do for them. How, as long as they 
lived, he would never waste a moment from their 
sides. It appeared that he had been at Tours, on 



148 OUT TO WIN 

a business trip when the war broke out, and could 
not get back to Lille before the Germans arrived 
there. For three and a half years he had lived 
in suspense, while everything he loved had lain 
behind the German lines. The woman contrib- 
uted no suggestions to his brilliant plans. She 
clung to him, but she tried to divert his affec- 
tion. When she spoke it was of small domestic 
abuses : the exorbitant prices she had had to pay 
for food ; the way in which the soldiery had 
stolen her pots and pans ; the insolence she had 
experienced when she had lodged complaints 
against the men before their officers. And the 
boy — he wanted to be a poilu. He kept invent- 
ing revenges he would take in battle, if the war 
lasted long enough for his class to be called out. 
As darkness fell they ceased talking. I began 
to realise that in three and a half years they had 
lost contact. They were saying over and over 
the things that had been said already; they were 
trying to prevent themselves from acknowledg- 
ing that they had grown different and separate. 
The only bond which held them as a family was 
their common loneliness and fear that, if they 
did not hold together, their intolerable loneli- 
ness would return. When the light was hooded, 
the boy sank his hand against his father's shoul- 
der; the woman nestled herself in the fold of 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 149 

his arm, with her head turned away from him, 
that he might not kiss her so often. The man 
sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them 
sleeping with a kind of impotent despair. They 
were together; and yet they were not together. 
He had recovered them ; nevertheless, he had not 
recovered them. Those Boches, the devils, they 
had kept something; they had only sent their 
bodies back. All night long, whenever I woke 
up as the train halted, the little man was still 
guarding them jealously as a dog guards a bone, 
and staring morosely at the blank wall of the 
future. 

These were among the lucky ones ; the boy and 
woman had had a man to meet them. Some- 
where in France there was protection awaiting 
them and the shelter of a house that was not 
charity. And yet . . . all night while they slept 
the man sat awake, facing up to facts. These 
were among the lucky ones ! That is Evian ; that 
is the tragedy and need of France as you see 
it embodied in individuals. 

The total number of repatries and refugies 
now in Franch is said to total a million and a 
half. The repatries are the French civilians who 
were captured by the Germans in their advance 
and have since been sent back. The refugies are 



150 OUT TO WIN 

the French civilians from the devastated areas, 
who have always remained on the Allies' side 
of the line. The refugies are divided into two 
classes: refugies proper — that is fugitives from 
the front, who fled for the most part at the time 
of the German invasion; and evacues — those who 
were sent out of the war zone by the military 
authorities. Naturally a large percentage of this 
million and a half have lost everything and, irre- 
spective of their former worldly position, now 
live with the narrowest margin between them- 
selves and starvation. The French Government 
has treated them with generosity, but in the midst 
of a war it has had little time to devote to edu- 
cating them into being self-supporting. A great 
number of funds have been privately raised for 
them in France ; many separate organisations for 
their relief have been started. The American 
Red Cross is making this million and a half 
people its special care, and to do so is co-operat- 
ing directly with the French Government and 
with existing French civilian projects. Its ac- 
tion is dictated by mercy and admiration, but 
in results this policy is the most far-seeing states- 
manship. A million and a half plundered peo- 
ple, if neglected and allowed to remain down- 
hearted, are likely to constitute a danger to the 
morale of the bravest nation. Again, from the 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 151 

point of view of after-war relations, to have been 
generous towards those who have suffered is to 
have won the heart of France. The caring for 
the French repatriates and refugees is a definite 
contribution to the winning of the war. 

The French system of handhng this human 
stream of tragedy is to send the sick to local hos- 
pitals and the exhausted to the maison de repos. 
The comparatively healthy are allowed to be 
claimed by friends ; the utterly homeless are sent 
to some prefecture remote from the front-line. 
The prefects in turn distribute them among towns 
and villages, lodging them in old barracks, ca- 
sinos and any buildings which war-conditions 
have made vacant. The adults are allowed by 
the Government a franc and a half per day, and 
the children seventy-five centimes. 

The armies have drained France of her doc- 
tors smce the war ; until the Americans came, the 
available medical attention was wholly inadequate 
to the civilian population. The American Red 
Cross is now establishing dispensaries through 
the length and breadth of France. In country 
districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurat- 
ing automobile-dispensaries which make their 
rounds on fixed and advertised days. In addition 
to this it has started a child-welfare movement, 
the aim of which is to build up the birth-rate and 



152 OUT TO WIN 

lower the infant mortality by spreading the right 
kind of knowledge among the women and girls. 
The condition of the refugees and repatriates, 
thrust into communities to which they came as 
paupers and crowded into buildings which were 
never planned for domestic purposes, has been 
far from enviable. In September, 19 17, the 
American Red Cross handed over the solving 
of this problem to one of its experts who had 
organised the aid given to San Francisco after 
the earthquake, and who had also had charge 
of the relief-work necessitated by the Ohio 
floods at Dayton. Co-operating with the French, 
houses partially constructed at the outbreak of 
war were now completed and furnished, and 
approximately three thousand families were sup- 
plied with homes and privacy. The start made 
proved satisfactory. Supplies, running into mil- 
lions of francs, were requisitioned, and the plan 
for getting the people out of public buildings 
into homes was introduced to the officials of most 
of the departments of France. Delegates were 
sent out by the Red Cross to undertake the or- 
ganisation of the work. Money was apportioned 
for the supplying of destitute families with fur- 
niture and the instruments of trade; the object 
in view was not to pauperise them, but to afford 
them the opportunity for becoming self-support- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 153 

ing. Re-construction work in those devastated 
areas which have been won back from the Boche 
was hurried forward in order that the people 
who had been uprooted from the soil might be 
returned to it and, in being returned to their own 
particular soil, might recover their place in life 
and their balance. 

I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de- 
Calais, Somme, Oise and Aisne and saw what is 
being accomplished. This destroyed territory is 
roughly one hundred miles long by thirty miles 
broad at its widest point. In 19 12 one-quarter 
of the wheat produced in France and eighty- 
seven per cent, of the beet crop employed in the 
national industry of sugar-making, were raised 
in these departments of the north. The invasion 
has diminished the national wheat production by 
more than a half. It is obvious, then, that in 
getting these districts once more under cultiva- 
tion two birds are being killed with one stone : the 
refugee is being made a self-supporting person — 
an economic asset instead of a dead weight — 
and the tonnage problem is being solved. If 
more food is grown behind the Western Front, 
grain-ships can be released for transporting the 
munitions of war from America, 

The French Government had already made a 
start in this undertaking before America came 



154 OUT TO WIN 

into the war. As early as 1914 it voted three 
hundred million francs and appointed a group 
of sous-prefets to see to the dispensing of it. 
Little by little, as the Huns have been driven 
back, the wealthier inhabitants, whose money was 
safe in Paris banks, have returned to these dis- 
tricts and opened ceuvres for the poorer inhab- 
itants. Many of them have lost their sons and 
husbands ; they find in their daily labour for oth- 
ers worse off than themselves an escape from 
life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of 
comparison and contrast. We are all of us un- 
happy or fortunate according to our standards 
of selfishness and our personal interpretation of 
our lot. These patriots are bravely turning their 
experience of sorrow into the materials of serv- 
ice. They can speak the one and only word 
which makes a bond of sympathy between the 
prosperous and the broken-hearted, *T, too, have 
suffered." I came across one such woman in 
the neighbourhood of Villequier-au-Mont. She 
was a woman of title and a royalist. Her es- 
tates had been laid waste by the invasion and 
all her men- folk, save her youngest son, were 
dead. Directly the Hun withdrew last spring, 
she came back to the wilderness which had been 
created and commenced to spend what remained 
of her fortune upon helping her peasants. These 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 155 

peasants had been the hewers of wood and draw- 
ers of water for the Hun for three and a half 
years. When his armies retreated, they took 
with them the girls and the young men, leaving 
behind only the weaklings, the children and the 
aged. Word came to the Red Cross official of 
the district that her remaining son had been 
killed in action ; he was asked to break the news 
to her. He went out to her ruined village and 
found her sitting among a group of women in 
the shell of a house, teaching them to make gar- 
ments for their families. She was pleased to see 
him; she was in need of more materials. She 
had been intending to make the journey to see 
him herself. She was full of her work and en- 
thusiastic over the valiance of her people. He 
led her aside and told her. She fell silent. Her 
face quivered — that was all. Then she com- 
pleted her list of requirements and went back to 
her women. In living to comfort other people's 
grief, she had no time to nurse her own. 

These "oeuvres," or groups of workers, settle 
down in a shattered village or township. The 
military authorities place the township in their 
charge. They at once commence to get roofs on 
to such houses as still have walls. They supply 
farm-implements, poultry, rabbits, carts, seeds, 
plants, etc. They import materials from Paris 



156 OUT TO WIN 

and form sewing classes for the women and girls. 
They encourage the trades-people to re-start their 
shops and lend them the necessary initial capital. 
What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the ter- 
ror-stricken population out of their caves and 
dug-outs, and set them an example of hope and 
courage. Some of the best pioneer work of this 
sort has been done by the English Society of 
Friends who now, together with the Friends of 
the United States, have become a part of the 
Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of the 
American Red Cross. 

The American Red Cross works through the 
"ceuvres" which it found already operating in the 
devastated area ; it places its financial backing at 
their disposal, its means of motor transport and 
its personnel; it grafts on other "oeuvres," op- 
erating in newly taken over villages, in which 
Americans, French and English work side by side 
for the common welfare; at strategic points be- 
hind the lines it has established a chain of relief 
warehouses, fully equipped with motor-lorries 
and cars. These warehouses furnish everything 
that an agricultural people starting life afresh can 
require — food, clothes, blankets, beds, mattresses, 
stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers, binders, mow- 
ing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools, 
soap, tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive of 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 157 

yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and 
waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty 
in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, 
sons, everything gone — not a penny left in the 
world — you can imagine your necessities, and 
then form some picture of the fore-thought that 
goes to the running of a Red Cross warehouse. 

But the poverty of these people is not the worst 
condition that the Red Cross workers have to 
tackle; money can always replace money. Hope, 
trust, affection and a genial beHef in the world's 
goodness cannot be transplanted into another 
man's heart in exchange for bitterness by even 
the most lavish giver. I can think of no modem 
parallel for their blank despair; the only elo- 
quence which approximately expresses it is tliat 
of Job, centuries old, "Why is light given to a 
man whose way is hid and whom God hath 
hedged in? My sighing cometh before I eat. 
My roarings are poured out like waters. My 
harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into 
the voice of them that weep. I was not in safety, 
neither had I rest, neither was I quiet ; yet trouble 
came." 

This hell which the Hun has created, beggars 
any description of Dante.* It is still more ap- 

* Since this was written and just as I am returning to 
the front, the Hun has set to work to create this hell for 



158 OUT TO WIN 

palling to remember that the external hell which 
one sees, does not represent one tithe of the 
dreariness which lies hidden behind the eyes of 
the inhabitants. To imagine amid such scenes is 
to paralyse compassion with agony. The crav- 
ing, never far from one's thoughts, is the age-old 
desire, "O that one might plead with God, as a 
man pleadeth for his neighbour !" 

I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a 
city well behind the lines. In the first half hour 
of the journey the country was green and pleas- 
ant. We passed some cavalry officers galloping 
across a brown field; birds were battling against 
a flurrying wind ; high overhead an aeroplane 
sailed serenely. There was a sense of life, mo- 
tion and exhilaration abroad, but only for the 
first half hour of our journey. Then momen- 
tarily a depression grew up about us. Fields and 
trees were becoming dead, as if a swarm of 
locusts had eaten their way across them. Green- 
ness was vanishing. Houses were becoming un- 
tenanted ; there were holes in the walls of many 
of them, through which one gained glimpses of 
the sky. Here, by the road-side, we passed a 
cluster of insignificant graves. Then, almost 

the second time. Most of the places referred to below are 
once more within the enemy country and all the mercy of 
the American Red Cross has been wiped out. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 159 

without warning, the barbed-wire entanglements 
commenced, and the miles and miles of aban- 
doned trenches. This, not a year ago from the 
day on which I write, was the Hun's country. 
Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, 
he retreated from it. Our oflfensives on the 
Somme had converted his Front into a dangerous 
salient. 

We are slowing down; the road is getting 
water-logged and full of holes. The skull of a 
dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at 
this distance the light behind empty windows 
glares malevolently like the nothingness in vacant 
sockets. A horror is over everything. The hor- 
ror is not so much due to the destruction as to 
the total absence of any signs of life. One man 
creeping through the landscape would make it 
seem more kindly. I have been in desolated 
towns often, but there were always the faces of 
our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars 
and gaps in the walls. From here life is ban- 
ished utterly. The battle-line has retired east- 
ward ; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns 
at times. No civilian has come to re-inhabit this 
unhallowed spot. 

We enter what were once its streets. They are 
nothing now but craters with boards across them. 
On either side the trees lie flat along the ground. 



i6o OUT TO WIN 

sawn through within a foot of the roots. What 
landmarks remain are the blackened walls of 
houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. 
The entire place must have been given over to 
explosion and incendiarism before the Huns de- 
parted. One stands in awe of such completeness 
of savagery; one begins to understand what is 
meant by the term "frightfulness." As far as 
eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but de- 
cayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, 
covered with a green slime where water has accu- 
mulated. This is not the unavoidable ruin of 
shell-fire. No battle was fought here. The 
demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy 
who, because he could not hold the place, was 
determined to leave nothing serviceable behind. 
With such masterly thoroughness has he done his 
work that the spot can never be re-peopled. The 
surrounding fields are too poisoned and churned 
up for cultivation. The French Government 
plans to plant a forest; it is all that can be done. 
As years go by, the kindliness of Nature may 
cause her to forget and cover up the scars of 
hatred with greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant 
lovers will wander here and refashion their 
dreams of a chivalrous world. Our generation 
will be dead by that time; throughout our lives 
this memorial to "f rightfulness" will remain. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION i6i 

We have left the town and are out in the open 
country. It is clean and unharried. Man can 
murder orchards and habitations — the things 
which man plants and makes; he finds it more 
difficult to strangle the primal gifts of Nature. 
All along by the roadside the cement telegraph- 
posts have been broken off short; some of them 
lie flat along the ground, others hang limply in 
the bent shape of hairpins. Very often we have 
to make a detour where a steel bridge has been 
blown up ; we cross the gulley over an improvised 
affair of struts and planks, and so come back into 
the main roadway. Every now and then we pass 
steam-tractors at work, ploughing huge fields 
into regular furrows. The French Department 
of Agriculture purchased in America nineteen 
teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn of last 
year. The American Red Cross has supplied 
others. The fields of this district are unfenced — 
the farmers used to live together in villages; so 
the work is made easy. It is possible to throw a 
number of holdings together and to apply to 
France the same wholesale mechanical means of 
wheat-growing that are employed on the prairies 
of Canada. All the cattle and horses have been 
carried off into Germany. All the farm-imple- 
ments have been destroyed — and destroyed with 
a surprising ingenuity. The same parts were de- 



i62 OUT TO WIN 

stroyed in each instrument, so that an entire in- 
strument could not be reconstructed. The farms 
could not have been brought under cultivation 
this year, had not the Government and the Red 
Cross lent their assistance. 

We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of 
Calvin. This is one of the few towns the Hun 
spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of a 
belated altruism, but purely to serve his own con- 
venience. There were some of the French civil- 
ians who weren't worth transporting to Germany. 
They would be too weak, or too old, or too young 
to earn their keep when he got them there. These 
he sorted out, irrespective of their family ties, 
and herded from the surrounding districts into 
Noyon. They were crowded into the houses and 
ordered under pain of death not to come out until 
they were given permission. They were further 
ordered to shutter all their windows and not to 
look out. 

As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, 
"We had no idea, Monsieur, what was to happen. 
Les Bodies had been with us for nearly three 
years; it never entered our heads that they were 
leaving. When they took the last of our young 
girls from us and all who were strong among our 
men, it was something that they had done so 
often and so often. When they made us hide 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 163 

in our houses, we thought it was only to prevent 
a disturbance. It is not easy to see your boys and 
girls marched away into slavery — Monsieur will 
understand that. Sometimes, on former occa- 
sions, the mothers had attacked les Bodies and 
the young girls had become hysterical; we 
thought that it was to avoid such scenes that we 
were shut up in our houses. When darkness fell, 
we sat in our rooms without any lights, for they 
also were forbidden. All night long through our 
streets we heard the endless tramping of battal- 
ions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, 
the sharp orders, the halting and the marching 
taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything grew 
silent. At first it would be broken occasionally 
by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling 
footsteps of a straggler. Then it grew into the 
absolute silence of death. It was nerve-racking 
and terrible. One could almost hear the breath- 
ing of the listening people in all the other houses. 
I do not know how time went or what was the 
hour. I could endure the suspense no longer. 
They might kill me, but . . . Ah well, at my age 
after nearly three years with *les Boches,' killing 
is a little matter ! I crept down the passage and 
drew back the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry 
might hear me. I opened the door just a crack. 
I expected to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but noth- 



i64 OUT TO WIN 

ing happened, I opened it wider, and saw that 
the street was empty and that it was broad day- 
Hght. Then I waited — I do not know how long 
I waited. I crouched against the wall, huddled 
with terror. All this took much longer in the 
doing than in the telling. At last I could bear 
myself no longer. I tiptoed out on to the pave- 
ment — and. Monsieur will believe me, I expected 
to drop dead. But no one disturbed me. Then 
I heard a rustling. Doors everywhere were 
opening stealthily, ah, so stealthily! Some one 
else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some one 
else. We stood there staring, aghast at our dar- 
ing. Suddenly we realised what had happened. 
The brutes had gone. We were free. It was 
indescril^able, what followed — we ran together, 
weeping and embracing. At first we wept for 
gladness; soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth 
had departed ; we were all old women or very 
ancient men. Two hours later our poilus came, 
like a blue-grey wave of laughter, fighting their 
way through the burning country that those 
swine had left in a sea of smoke and flames." 

And so that was why the Hun spared Noyon. 
But if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.* 

* Goodness knows where the "present Front-line" may be 
by the time this book is published. I visited Noyon in 
February, 1918, just before the big Hun offensive com- 
menced. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 165 

Every village between here and the present front 
line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. 
The wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime 
stir one's heart to pity and his soul to white-hot 
anger. The people who did this must make pay- 
ment in more than money; to settle such a debt 
blood is required. American soldiers who came 
to Europe to do a job and with no decided detes- 
tation of the Hun, are being taught by such land- 
scapes. They know now why they came. The 
wounds of France are educating them. 

There has been a scheme proposed in America 
under which certain individual cities and towns 
in the States shall make themselves responsible 
for the re-building of certain individual cities and 
towns in the devastated areas. The scheme is 
noble; it has only one drawback, namely that it 
specialises effort and tends to ignore the immen- 
sity of the problem as a whole. I visited one of 
these towns — it is a town for which Philadelphia 
has made itself responsible. I wish the people 
of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the task 
they have undertaken. There is a church-spire 
still standing; that is about all. The rest is a 
pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some 
Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a 
nurse. They run a dispensary for the people who 
keep house for the most part in cellars and holes 



i66 OUT TO WIN 

in the ground. A doctor visits them to hold a 
clinic ever so often. They have a little ware- 
house, in which they keep the necessities for im- 
mediate relief work. They have a rest hut for 
soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour 
they can hire for the roofing of some of the least 
damaged cottages ; for this temporary reconstruc- 
tion they provide the materials. When I was 
there, the place was well within range of enemy 
shell-fire. The approach had to be made by way 
of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these 
brave women was that on account of their near- 
ness to the front-line, the military might compel 
them to move back. In order to safeguard them- 
selves against this and to create a good impres- 
sion, they were making a strong point of enter- 
taining whatever officers were billeted in this vi- 
cinity. Their effort to remain in this rural Go- 
morrah was as courageous as it was pathetic. 
"The people need us," they said, and then, "you 
don't think we'll be moved back, do you?" I 
thought they would, and I didn't think that the 
grateful officers would be able to prevent it — they 
were subalterns and captains for the most part. 
"But we once had a major to tea," they said. "A 
major!" I exclaimed, trying to look impressed, 
"Oh well, that makes a difference!" 

There was one unit I wished especially to visit ; 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 167 

it was a unit consisting entirely of women, sent 
over and financed by a women's college. When 
I was in America last October and heard that 
they were starting, I made up my mind that they 
were doomed to disappointment. I pictured the 
battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it — a 
sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the 
troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard 
with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreck- 
age of what once were human bodies. I could 
not imagine what useful purpose women could 
serA'e amid such surroundings. It seemed to me 
indecent that they should be allowed to go there. 
They were going to do reconstruction, I was told. 
Reconstruction ! you can't reconstruct towns and 
villages the very foundations of which have been 
buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses 
such annihilation, "The place thereof shall know 
it no more." Yes, only the names remain in one's 
memory — the very sites have been covered up 
and the contours of the landscape re-dug with 
high explosives. It took millions of pounds to 
work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground 
and sprung mines without warning. They 
climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to 
hurl death from the clouds. They lined up their 
guns, tier upon tier, almost axle to axle in places, 
and at a given sign rained a deluge of corruption 



i68 OUT TO WIN 

on a country miles in front, which they could not 
even discern. The infantry went over the top 
throwing bombs and piled themselves up into 
mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day 
and night in factories — and all that they might 
achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence 
of the project made one smile — a handful of 
women sailing from America to reconstruct ! To 
reconstruct will take ten times more effort than 
was required to destroy. More than eight hun- 
dred years ago William the Norman burnt his 
way through the North Country to Chester. 
Yorkshire has not yet recovered ; it is still a wind- 
swept moorland. This women's college in Amer- 
ica hoped to repair in our lifetime a ruin a million 
times more terrible. Their courage was depress- 
ing, it so exceeded the possible. They might love 
one village back to life, but ... . That is ex- 
actly what they are doing. 

I arrived at Grecourt on an afternoon in Jan- 
uary. It is here that the women of the Smith 
College Unit have taken up their tenancy. We 
had extraordinary difficulty in finding the place. 
The surrounding country had been blasted and 
scorched by fire. There was no one left of whom 
we could enquire. Everything had perished. 
Barns, houses, everything habitable had been 
blown up by the departing Hun. As a study in 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 169 

the painstaking completion of a purpose the 
scenes through which we passed almost called for 
admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to 
destroy everything before withdrawing; they had 
obeyed with a loving thoroughness. The world 
has never seen such past masters in the art of 
demolition. Ever since they invaded Belgium, 
their hand has been improving. In the neigh- 
bourhood of Grecourt they have equalled, if not 
surpassed, their own best efforts. I would sug- 
gest to the Kaiser that this manly performance 
calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is true 
that his armies were beaten and retiring; but 
does not that fact rather enhance their valour? 
They were retiring, yet there were those who 
were brave enough to delay their departure till 
they had achieved this final victory over old 
women and children to the lasting honour of 
their country. Such heroes are worthy to stand 
beside the sinkers of the Lusitania. It is not just 
that they should go unrecorded. 

In the midst of this hell I came across a tum- 
bled chateau. Its roof, its windows, its stair- 
ways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its 
former happiness was left standing. A high wall 
ran about its grounds. The place must have been 
pleasant with flower-gardens once. ^ There was 
an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a por- 



170 OUT TO WIN 

ter's lodge and a broad driveway. At the back 
I found rows of little wood-huts. There was a 
fragrance of log-fires burning. I was glad of 
that, for I had heard of the starving cold these 
women had had to endure through the first win- 
ter months of their tenure. On tapping at a 
door, I found the entire colony assembled. It 
was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the seven- 
teen who form the colony were present. A box- 
stove, such as we use in our pioneer shacks in 
Canada, was throwing out a glow of cheeriness. 
Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of 
feminine taste had been hung here and there to 
disguise the bareness of the walls. A bed, in one 
corner, was carefully disguised as a couch. Save 
for the fact that there was no glass in the win- 
dow — glass being unobtainable in France at pres- 
ent — one might easily have persuaded himself 
that he was back in America in the room of a 
girl-undergraduate. 

The method of my greeting furthered this illu- 
sion. Americans, both men and women, have an 
extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining 
normal in the most abnormal surroundings. They 
refuse to allow themselves to be surprised by any 
upheaval of circumstances. "I should worry," 
they seem to be saying, and press straight on 
with the job in hand. There was one small touch 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 171 

which made the environment seem even more 
friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on 
being introduced, promptly read to me a letter 
which she had just received from my sister in 
America. It made this oasis in an encircling 
wilderness seem very much a part of a neigh- 
bourly world. This girl is an example of the 
varied ex|>eriences which have trained American 
women into becoming the nursemaids of the 
French peasantry. 

She was visiting relations in Liege when the 
war broke out. On the Sunday she went for a 
walk on the embattlements and was turned back. 
Baulked in this direction, she strolled out towards 
the country and found men digging trenches. 
That was the first she knew that war was ru- 
moured. On the Tuesday, two days later, Hun 
shells were detonating on the house-tops. She 
was held prisoner in Liege for some months after 
the Forts had fallen and saw more than all the 
crimes against humanity that the Bryce Report 
has recorded. At last she disguised herself and 
contrived her escape into Holland. From there 
she worked her way back to America and now 
she is at Grecourt, starting shops in the villages, 
educating the children, and behaving generally as 
if to respond to the ''Follow thou me" of the 



172 OUT TO WIN 

New Testament was an entirely unheroic pro- 
ceeding for a woman. 

And what are these women doing at Grecourt ? 
To condense their purpose into a phrase, I should 
say that by their example they are bringing sanity 
back into the lives of the French peasants. That 
is what the American Fund for French Wounded 
is doing at Blerancourt, what all these recon- 
struction units are doing in the devastated areas, 
and what the American Red Cross is doing on a 
much larger scale for the whole of France. At 
Grecourt they have a dispensary and render med- 
ical aid. If the cases are grave, they are sent to 
the American Hospital at Nesle. They hunt out 
the former tradespeople among the refugees and 
encourage them to re-start their shops, lending 
them the money for the purpose. If the men are 
captives in Germany, then their wives are helped 
to carry on the business in their absence and for 
their sakes. Groups of mothers are brought to- 
gether and set to work on making clothes for 
themselves and their children. Schools are 
opened so that the children may be more care- 
fully supervised. Two of the girls at Grecourt 
have learnt to plough and are instructing the 
peasant women. Cows are kept and a dairy has 
been started to provide the under-nourished 
babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 173 

is sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the 
remoter districts. It has a seat along one side for 
the patient and the nurse. Over the seat is a rack 
for medicine and instruments. On the opposite 
side is a rack for splints and surgical dressings. On 
the floor of the car a shower-bath is arranged, 
which is so compact that it can be carried into the 
house where the water is to be heated. The water is 
put into a tub on a wooden base ; while the doctor 
manipulates the pump for the shower, the nurse 
does the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among 
the children are due to dirt; the importance of 
keeping clean, which such colonies as that at Gre- 
court are impressing on all the people whom they 
serve, is doing much to improve the general state 
of health. In this direction, as in so many others, 
the most valuable contribution that they are mak- 
ing to their districts is not material and financial, 
but mental — the contribution of example and sug- 
gestion. Seventeen women cannot re-build in a 
day an external civilisation which has been blotted 
out by the savagery of a nation ; but they can and 
they are re-building the souls of the human dere- 
licts who have survived the savagery. This war 
is going to be won not by the combination of 
nations which has most men and guns, but by the 
side which possesses the highest spiritual qual- 
ities. The same is true of the countries which 



174 OUT TO WIN 

will wipe out the effects of war most quickly when 
the war is ended. The first countries to recover 
will be those which fight on in a new way, after 
peace has been signed, for the same ideals for 
which they have shed their blood. The sight of 
these American women, living helpfully and vol- 
untarily for the sake of others among hideous 
surroundings, is a perpetual reminder to the dis- 
pirited refugees that, whatever else is lost, val- 
iance and loyalty still survive. 

From Grecourt I went farther afield to Croix, 
Y and Matigny. Here a young architect is in 
charge of the reconstruction. No attempt is 
being made at present to re-build the farms en- 
tirely. Labour is difficult to obtain — it is all re- 
quired for military purposes. The same applies 
to materials. Patching is the best that can be 
done. Just to get a roof over one corner of a 
ruin is as much as can be hoped for. Until that 
is done the people have to live in cellars, in shell- 
holes, in verminous dug-outs like beasts of prey 
or savages. Their position is far more deplor- 
able than that of Indians, for they once knew the 
comforts of civilisation. For instance, I visited 
a farmer who before the war was a millionaire 
in French money. Many of the farmers of this 
district were; their acreages were large even by 
prairie standards. The American Red Cross has 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 175 

managed to reconstruct one room for him in a 
pile of debris which was once a spacious house. 
There he Hves with his old wife, who, during the 
Hun occupation, became nearly blind and almost 
completely paralytic. His sons and daughters 
have been swept beyond his knowledge by the 
departing armies. Before the Huns left, he had 
to stand by and watch them uselessly lay waste 
his home and possessions. His trees are cut 
down. His barns are laid flat. His cattle are 
behind the German lines. At the age of seventy, 
he is starting all afresh and working harder than 
ever he did in his life. The young architect of 
the Red Cross visits him often. They sit in the 
little room of nights, erecting barns and houses 
more splendid than those that have vanished, but 
all in the green quiet of the untested future. They 
shall be standing by the time the captive sons 
come back. It is a game at which they play for 
the sake of the blinded mother; she listens smil- 
ingly, nodding her old head, her frail hands 
folded in her lap. 

These pictures which I have painted are typical 
of some of the things that the American Red 
Cross is doing. They are isolated examples, 
which by no means cover all its work. There are 
the rolling canteens which it has instituted, which 
follow the French armies. There are the rest 



176 OUT TO WIN 

houses it has built on the French Hne of com- 
munications for poiliis who are going on leave or 
returning. There is the farm for the mutilated, 
where they are taught to be specialists in certain 
branches of agriculture, despite their physical cur- 
tailments. There is the great campaign against 
tuberculosis which it is waging. There are its 
w-ell-conceived warehouses, stored with medical 
supplies and military and relief necessities, 
spreading in a great net-work of usefulness and 
connected by ambulance transport throughout the 
whole of the stricken part of France. There are 
its hospitals, both military' and civil. There is 
the "Lighthouse" for men wounded in battle, 
founded by Miss Holt in Paris. 

I visited this Lighthouse ; it is a place infinitely 
brave and pathetic. Most of the men were picked 
heroes at the war; they wear their decorations in 
proof of it. They are greater heroes than ever 
now. Nothing has more deeply moved me than 
my few hours among those sightless eyes. In 
many cases the faces are hideously marred, the 
eyelids being quite grown together. In several 
cases besides the eyes, the arms or legs have gone. 
I have talked and written a good deal about the 
courage which this war has inspired in ordinary 
men; but the courage of these blinded men, who 
once were ordinary, leaves me silent and appalled. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 177 

They are happy — how and why I cannot under- 
stand. Most of them have been taught at the 
Lighthouse how to overcome their disabiHty and 
are earning their living as weavers, stenog- 
raphers, potters, munition-workers. Quite a 
number of them have families to support. The 
only complaint that is made against them by their 
brother-workmen is that they are too rapid ; they 
set too strenuous a pace for the men with eyes. 
It is a fact that in all trades where sensitiveness 
of touch is an asset, blindness has increased their 
efficiency. This is peculiarly so at the Sevres pot- 
tery-works where I saw them making the moulds 
for retorts. A soldier, who was teaching a seeing 
person Braille, explained his own quickness of 
perception when he exclaimed, "Ah, madame, it is 
your eyes which prevent you from seeing!" 

I heard some of the stories of the men. There 
was a captain who, after he had been wounded 
and while there was yet time to save his sight, 
insisted on being taken to his General that he 
might inform him about a German mine. When 
his mission was completed, his chance of seeing 
was forever ended. 

There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a 
raid and left for dead out in No Man's Land. 
Just before he became unconscious, he placed two 
lumps of earth in line in the direction which led 



178 OUT TO WIN 

back to his own trenches. He knew the direction 
by the sound of the retreating footsteps. When- 
ever he came to himself he groped his way a little 
nearer to France and before he fainted again, 
registered the direction with two more lumps of 
earth placed in line. It took him a day to crawl 
back. 

There was another man who illustrated in a 
finer way that saying, "It is your eyes which pre- 
vent you from seeing." This man before the war 
was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling. 
He had a sister who had spent her youth for him 
and worshipped him beyond everything in the 
world. He took her adoration brutally for 
granted. At the outbreak of hostilities he joined 
the army, serving bravely in the ranks till he was 
hopelessly blinded. Having always been a thor- 
oughly selfish man, his privation drove him nearly 
to madness. He had always used the world ; now 
for the first time he had been used by it. His 
viciousness broke out in blasphemy ; he hated 
both God and man. He made no distinction be- 
tween people in the mass and the people who tried 
to help him. His whole desire was to inflict as 
much pain as he himself suffered. When his sis- 
ter came to visit him, he employed every ingenu- 
ity of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do 
what she would, he refused to allow her love 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 179 

either to reach or comfort him. She was only a 
simple peasant woman. In her grief and loneli- 
ness she thought matters out and arrived at what 
seemed to her a practical solution. On her next 
visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor. 
She was taken to him and made her request. "I 
love my brother," she said ; "I have always given 
him everything. He has lost his eyes and he can- 
not endure it. Because I love him, I could bear 
it better. I have been thinking, and I am sure it 
is possible : I want you to remove my eyes and to 
put them into his empty sockets." 

When the priest was told of her offer, he 
laughed derisively at her for a fool. Then the 
reason she had given for her intended sacrifice 
was told to him, "Because I love him, I could bear 
it better." He fell silent. All that day he re- 
fused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled by 
his bandages, he was arriving at the truth : she 
had been willing to suffer what he was now suf- 
fering, because she loved him. The hand of 
love would have made the burden bearable and, 
if for her, why not for himself? At last, after 
years of refusal, the simphcity of her tenderness 
reached and touched him. Presently he was dis- 
charged from hospital and taken in hand by the 
teachers of the blind, who taught him to play the 
organ. One day his sister came and led him back 



i8o OUT TO WIN 

to his village-parish. Before the war, by his ex- 
ample, he was a danger to God and man ; now he 
sets a very human example of sainthood, labour- 
ing without ceasing for others more fortunate 
than himself. He has increased his efficiency for 
service by his blindness. Of him it is absolutely 
true that it was his eyes that prevented him from 
seeing — from seeing the splendour that lay hid- 
den in himself, no less than in his fellow crea- 
tures. 

So far I have sketched in the main what the 
war of compassion is doing for the repatries — 
the captured French civilians sent back from Ger- 
many — and for the refugees of the devastated 
areas, wdio have either returned to their ruined 
farms and villages or were abandoned as useless 
when the Hun retired. To complete the picture 
it remains to describe what is being done for the 
civilian population which has always lived in the 
battle area of the French armies. 

The question may be asked why civilians have 
been allowed to live here. Curiously enough it is 
due to the extraordinary humanity of the French 
Government which makes allowances for the al- 
most religious attachment of the peasant to his 
tiny plot of land ; it is an attachment which is as 
instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of a cat 
for her young. He will endure shelling, gassing 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION i8i 

and all the horrors that scientific invention has 
produced; he will see his cottage and his bams 
shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will 
not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled 
over, unless he is driven out at the point of the 
bayonet. I have been told, though I have never 
seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French 
peasants will gather in their harvest actually in 
full sight of the Hun. Shells may be falling, but 
they go stolidly on with their work. There is an- 
other reason for this leniency of the Government : 
they have enough refugees on their hands already 
and are not going in search of further trouble, un- 
til the trouble is forced upon them by circum- 
stances. 

As may be imagined, these people live under 
physical conditions that are terrible. They con- 
sist for the most part of women and children; the 
women are over-worked and the children are neg- 
lected. Skin diseases and vermin abound. Clothes 
are negligible. Washing is a forgotten luxury. 
Much havoc is wrought by asphyxiating gases 
which drift across the front-line into the back- 
country. To the adults are issued protective 
masks like those that the soldiers wear, but the 
children do not know how to use them. Many of 
them are orphans, and live like little animals on 
roots and offal ; for shelter they seek holes in the 



i82 OUT TO WIN 

ground. The American Red Cross is specialising 
on its efforts to reclaim these children, realising 
that whatever happens to the adults, the children 
are the hope of the world. 

The part of the Front to which I went to study 
this work was made famous in 19 14 by the dis- 
embowellings, shootings and unspeakable inde- 
cencies that were perpetrated there. Near by is 
the little village in which Sister Julie risked her 
life by refusing to allow her wounded to be butch- 
ered. She wears the Legion of Honour now. In 
the same neighbourhood there lives a Mayor 
who, after having seen his young wife murdered, 
protected her murderers from the lynch-law of 
the mob when next day the town was recaptured. 
In the same district there is a meadow where 
fifteen old men were done to death, while a Hun 
officer sat under an oak-tree, drinking mocking 
toasts to the victims of each new execution. 

The influence of more than three years of war- 
fare has not been elevating, as far as these peas- 
ants are concerned. As early as July, a little over 
a month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was 
sent out by the Prefet of the department, beg- 
ging the American Red Cross to come and help. 
In addition to the refugees of old standing, 350 
children had been suddenly put into his care. He 
had nothing but a temporary shelter for them and 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 183 

his need for assistance was acute. Within a few- 
hours the Red Cross had despatched eight work- 
ers — a doctor, nurse, bacteriologist, an adminis- 
trative director and two women to take charge of 
the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette 
loaded with condensed milk and other relief ne- 
cessities was sent by road. On the arrival of the 
party, they found the children herded together in 
old barracks, dirty and unfurnished, with no 
sanitary appliances whatsoever. The sick were 
crowded together with the well. Of the 350 
children, twenty-one were under one year of age, 
and the rest between one and eight years. The 
reason for this sudden crisis was that the Huns 
were bombing the villages behind the lines with 
asphyxiating gas. The military authorities had 
therefore withdrawn all children who were too 
young to adjust their masks themselves, at the 
same time urging their mothers to carry on the 
patriotic duty of gathering in the harv^est. It 
was the machinery of mercy which had been built 
up in six months about this nucleus of eight per- 
sons that I set out to visit. 

The roads were crowded with the crack troops 
of France — the Foreign Legion, the Tailleurs, 
the Moroccans — all marching in one direction, 
eastward to the trenches. There were rumours 
of something immense about to happen — no one 



i84 OUT TO WIN 

knew quite what. Were we going to put on a new 
offensive or were we going to resist one ? Many 
answers were given: they were all guesswork. 
Meanwhile, our progress was slow ; we were con- 
tinually halting to let brigades of artillery and 
regiments of infantry pour into the main artery 
of traffic from lanes and side-roads. When we 
had backed our car into hedges to give them 
room to pass, we watched the sea of faces. They 
were stem and yet laughing, elated and yet child- 
ish, eloquent of the love of living and yet familiar 
with their old friend, Death, They knew that 
something big was to be demanded of them; be- 
fore the demand had been made, they had deter- 
mined to give to the ultimate of their strength. 
There was a spiritual resolution about their faces 
which made all their expressions one — the up- 
lifted expression of the unconquered soul of 
France. That expression blotted out their racial 
differences. It did not matter that they were 
Arabs, Negroes, Normans, Parisians ; they owned 
to one nationality — the nationality of martyrdom 
— and they marched with a single purpose, that 
freedom might be restored to the world. 

When we reached the city to which we jour- 
neyed, night had fallen. There was something 
sinister about our entry; we were veiled in fog, 
and crept through the gate and beneath the ram- 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 185 

parts with extinguished head lights. Scarcely any- 
one was abroad. Those whom we passed, loomed 
out of the mist in silence, passed stealthily and 
vanished. 

This city is among the most beautiful in 
France; until recently, although within range of 
the Hun artillery, it had been left undisturbed. 
In return the French had spared an equally beauti- 
ful city on the other side of the line. This clem- 
ency, shown towards two gems of architecture, 
was the result of one of those silent bargains that 
are arranged in the language of the guns. But 
the bargain had been broken by the time I ar- 
rived. Bombing planes had been over ; the Allied 
planes had retaliated. Houses, emptied like cart- 
loads of bricks into the street, were significant of 
the ruin that was pending. Any moment the or- 
chestra of destruction might break into its over- 
ture. Without cessation one could hear a distant 
booming. The fiddlers of death were tuning up. 

Early next morning I went to see the Pre- 
fet. He is an old man, whose courage has made 
him honoured wherever the French tongue is 
spoken. Others have thought of their own safety 
and withdrawn into the interior. Never from the 
start has his sense of duty wavered. Night and 
day he has laboured incessantly for the refugees, 
whom he refers to always as "my suffering peo- 



i86 OUT TO WIN 

pie." He kept me waiting for some time. Directly 
I entered he volunteered the explanation : he had 
just received word from the military authorities 
that the whole of his civil population must be im- 
mediately evacuated. To evacuate a civil popu- 
lation means to tear it up and transplant it root 
and branch, with no more of its possession than 
can be carried as hand-baggage. Some 75,000 
people would be made homeless directly the Pre- 
fet published the order. 

It was a dramatic moment, full of tragedy. I 
glanced out into the square filled with wintry 
sunlight. I took note of the big gold gates and 
the monuments. I watclied the citizens halting 
here and there to chat, or going about their 
errands with a quiet confidence. All this was to 
be shattered; it had been decided. The same 
thing was to happen here as had happened at 
Ypres. The bargain was off. The enemy city, 
the other side of the line, was to be shelled; this 
city had to take the consequences. The bar- 
gain was off not only as far as the city was con- 
cerned, but also as regards its inhabitants' happi- 
ness. They had homes to-day ; they would be 
fugitives to-morrow. Then I looked at the old 
Prefet, who had to break the news to them. He 
was sitting at his table in his uniform of office, 
supporting his head in his tired hands. 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 187 

**What are you going to do?" I asked. 

*'I have called on the Croix Rouge Americaine 
to help me," he said. "They have helped me be- 
fore ; they will help me again. These Americans 
— I have never been to America — but they are my 
friends. Since they came, they have looked after 
my babies. Their doctors and nurses have worked 
day and night for my suffering people. They are 
silent ; but they do things. There is love in their 
hands." 

While I was still with him the Red Cross offi- 
cials arrived. They had already wired to Paris. 
Their lorries and ambulances were converging 
from all points to meet the emergency. They 
undertook at once to place all their transport facil- 
ities at his disposal. They had started their ar- 
rangements for the handling of the children. Ex- 
tra personnel were being rushed to the spot. 
There was one unit already in the city. They had 
hoped to go nearer to the Front, but on arriving 
had learnt that their permission had been can- 
celled. It was a bit of luck. They could set to 
work at once. 

I knew this unit and went out to find it. It was 
composed of American society girls, who had 
been protected all their lives from ugliness. They 
had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas 
of the war conditions they would encounter; they 



i88 OUT TO WIN 

believed that they were needed to do a nurse- 
maid's job for France. Their original purpose 
was to found a creche for the babies of women 
munition-workers. When they got to Paris they 
found that such institutions were not wanted. 
They at once changed their programme, and asked 
to be allowed to take their creche into the army 
zone and convert it into a hospital for refugee 
children. There were interminable delays due to 
passport formalities — the delays dragged on for 
three months. During those three months they 
were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just as 
comfortably as they had done in New York and, 
consequently, grew disgusted. They had sailed 
for France prepared to give something that they 
had never given before, and France did not seem 
to want it. At last their passports came ; without 
taking any chances, they got out of Paris and 
started for the Front. Their haste was well- 
timed; no sooner had they departed than a mes- 
sage arrived, cancelling their permissions. They 
had reached the doomed city in which I was at 
present, two days before its sentence was pro- 
nounced. Within four hours of their arrival they 
had had their first experience of being bombed. 
Their intention had been to open their hospital in 
a town still nearer to the front-line. The hospital 
was prepared and waiting for them. But in the 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 189 

last few days the military situation had changed. 
A hospital so near the trenches stood a good 
chance of being destroyed by shell-fire; so once 
again the unit was held up. It volunteered to 
abandon its idea of running the hospital for chil- 
dren ; it would run it as a first aid hospital for the 
armies. The offer was refused. These girls, 
whose gravest interest a year ago had been the 
season's dances and the latest play, were deter- 
mined to experience the thrill of sacrifice. So 
here they were in the doomed city, as the Red 
Cross officials said, "by luck" — the very place 
where they were most needed. 

When I visited them, after leaving the Prefet's, 
they had not yet heard that they were to be al- 
lowed to stay. They had heard nothing of the 
city's sentence or of the evacuation of the civil 
population. All they knew was that the hospital, 
which had been appointed with their money, was 
only a few kilometres away and that they were 
forbidden even to see it. They were gloomy with 
the fear that within a handful of days they would 
be again walking the boulevards of Paris. When 
the news was broken to them of the part they were 
to play, the full significance of it did not dawn 
on them at once. "But we don't want anything 
easy," they complained ; "this isn't the Front." 
"It will be soon," the official told them. When 



I90 OUT TO WIN 

they heard that they cheered up ; then their share 
in the drama was explained. In all probability the 
city would soon be under constant shell-fire. Ref- 
ugees would be pouring back from the forward 
country. The people of the city itself had to be 
helped to escape before the bombardment com- 
menced. They would have to stay there taking 
care of the children, packing them into lorries, 
driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the 
wounded and decrepit out of danger and always 
returning to it again themselves. As the cer- 
tainty of the risk and service was impressed on 
them their faces brightened. Risk and service, 
that was what they most desired ; they were girls, 
but they hungered to play a soldier's part. They 
had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed 
from New York, Those three months of waiting 
had stung their pride. It was in Paris that the 
dream of risk had commenced. They would make 
France want them. Their chance had come. 

When I came out into the streets again the 
word was spreading. Carts were being loaded in 
front of houses. Everything on wheels, from 
wagons to perambulators, was being piled up. 
Everything on four legs, dogs, cattle, horses, was 
being harnessed and made to do its share in haul- 
ing. We left the city, going back to the next 
point where the refugees would be cared for. On 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 191 

either side of the road, as far as eye could stretch, 
trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, 
blockades and wire-entanglements constructed. It 
all lay very quiet beneath the sunlight. It seemed 
a kind of preposterous pretence. One could not 
imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating 
torture and agony and death. I looked back at 
the city, one of the most beautiful in France, 
growing hazy in the distance with its spires and 
its ramparts. Impossible! Then I remembered 
the carts being hurriedly loaded and the uplifted 
faces of those American girls. Where had I seen 
their expression before? Yes. Strange that they 
should have caught it ! Their expression was the 
same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs, 
the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans — the crack 
troops of France. ... So they had become that 
already! At the first hint of danger, their cour- 
age had taken command; they had risen into 
soldiers. 

Through villages swarming with troops and 
packed with ordnance we arrived at an old 
caserne, which has been converted into the chil- 
dren's hospital of the district. It is in charge of 
one of the first of America's children's specialists. 
While he works among the refugees, his wife, 
who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially 
mutilated. He has brought with him from the 



192 OUT TO WIN 

States some of his students, but his staff is in the 
main cosmopolitan. One of his nurses is an Aus- 
trahan, who was caught at the outbreak of hos- 
tilities in Austria and because of her knowledge, 
despite her nationality, was allowed to help to 
organise the Red Cross work of the enemy. An- 
other is a French woman who wears the Croix de 
Guerre with the palm. She saved her wounded 
from the fury of the Hun when her village was 
lost, and heli>ed to get them back to safety after 
it had been recaptured. The Matron is Swedish 
and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers are some of 
the American boys who saw serv'ice with the 
French armies. In this group of workers there 
are as many stories as there are nationalities. 

If the workers have their stories, so have the 
five hundred little patients. This barrack, con- 
verted into a hospital, is full of babies, the young- 
est being only six days old when I was there. 
Many of the children have no parents. Others 
have lost their mothers ; their fathers are serving 
in the trenches. It is not always easy to find out 
how they became orphans ; there are such plenti- 
ful chances of losing parents who live continually 
under shell-fire. One little boy on being asked 
where his mother was, replied gravely, "My 
Mama, she is dead. Les Boches, they put a gun 
to 'er 'ead. She is finished; I 'ave no Mama." 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 193 

The unchildlike stoicism of these children is 
appalling. I spent two days among them and 
heard no crying. Those who are sick, lie motion- 
less as waxen images in their cots. Those who 
are supposedly well, sit all day brooding and say- 
ing nothing. When first they arrive, their faces 
are earth-coloured. The first thing they have to 
be taught is how to be children. They have to 
be coaxed and induced to play; even then they 
soon grow weary. They seem to regard mere 
playing as frivolous and indecorous ; and so it is 
in the light of the tragedies they have witnessed. 
Children of seven have seen more of horror in 
three years than most old men have read about 
in a life-time. Many of them have been captured 
by and recaptured from the Huns. They have 
been in villages where the dead lay in piles and 
not even the women were spared. They have 
been present while indecencies were worked upon 
their mothers. They have seen men hanged, shot, 
bayoneted and flung to roast in burning houses. 
The pictures of all these things hang in their eyes. 
When they play, it is out of politeness to the kind 
Americans ; not because they derive any pleasure 
from it. 

Night is the troublesome time. The children 
hide under their beds with terror. The nurses 
have to go the rounds continually. If the children 



194 OUT TO WIN 

would only cry, they would give warning'. But 
instead, they creep silently out from between the 
sheets and crouch against the floor like dumb ani- 
mals. Dumb animals! That is what they are 
when first they are brought in. Their most prim- 
itive instincts for the beginnings of cleanliness 
seem to have vanished. They have been fished 
out of caves, ruined dug-outs, broken houses. 
They are as full of skin-diseases as the beggar 
who sat outside Dives' gate, only they have had 
no dogs to lick their sores. They have lived on 
offal so long that they have the faces of the ex- 
tremely aged. And their hatred! Directly you 
utter the word "Boche," all the little night- 
gowned figures sit up in their cots and curse. 
When they have done cursing, of their own ac- 
cord they sing the Marseillaise. 

Surely if God listens to prayers of vengeance, 
He will answer the husky petitions of these vic- 
tims of Hun cruelty! The quiet, just, deep- 
seated venom of these babies will work the Hun 
more harm than many batteries. Their fathers 
come back from the trenches to see them. On 
leaving, they turn to the American nurses, "We 
shall fight better now," they say, "because we 
know that you are taking care of them." 

When those words are spoken, the American 
Red Cross knows that it is achieving its object 



THE WAR OF COMPASSION 195 

and is winning its war of compassion. The whole 
drive of all its effort is to win the war in the 
shortest possible space of time. It is in Europe 
to save children for the future, to re-kindle hope 
in broken lives, to mitigate the toll of unavoidable 
suffering, but first and foremost to help men to 
fight better. 



IV 
THE LAST WAR 

The last war! I heard the phrase for the first 
time on the evening' after Great Britain had de- 
clared war. I was in Quebec en route for Eng- 
land, wondering whether my ship was to be al- 
lowed to sail. There had been great excitement 
all day, bands playing the Marseillaise, French- 
men marching arm-in-arm singing, orators ges- 
ticulating and haranguing from balconies, street- 
corners and the base of statues. 

Now that the blue August night was falling and 
every one was released from work, the excitement 
was redoubled. Quebec was finding in war an 
opportunity for carnival. Throughout all the 
pyramided city the Tri-colour and the Union Jack 
were waving. At the foot of the Heights, the 
broad basin of the St. Lawrence was a-drift in 
the dusk with fluttering pennons. They looked 
like homing birds, settling in dovecotes of the 
masts and rigging. 

As night deepened, Chinese lanterns were 
196 



THE LAST WAR 197 

lighted and carried on poles through the narrow 
streets. Troops of merry-makers followed them, 
blowing horns, dragging bells, tin-cans, anything 
that would make a noise and express high spirits. 
They linked arms with girls as they marched and 
were lost, laughing in the dusk. If a French re- 
servist could be found who was sailing in the first 
ship bound for the slaughter, he became the hero 
of the hour and was lifted shoulder high at the 
head of the procession. War was a brave game 
at which to play. This was to be a short war and 
a merry one. Down with the Germans ! Up with 
France ! Hurrah for the entente cordiale ! 

Beneath the coronet of stars on the Heights of 
Abraham the spirit of Wolfe kept watch and 
brooded. It was under these circumstances, that 
I heard the phrase for the first time — the last war. 

The street was blocked with a gaping crowd. 
All the faces were raised to an open window, two 
storeys up, from which the frame had been taken 
out. Inside the building one could hear the 
pounding of machinery, for it was here that the 
most important paper of Quebec was printed. 
Across a huge white sheet a man on a hanging 
platform painted the latest European cables. A 
cluster of electric lights illuminated him strongly ; 
but he was not the centre of the crowd's atten- 
tion. In the window stood another man. Like 



198 OUT TO WIN 

myself he was waiting for his ship to sail, but not 
to England — to France. He was a returning 
French reservist. Across the many miles of ocean 
the hand of duty had stretched and touched him; 
he was ecstatically glad that he was wanted. In 
those first days this ecstasy of gladness was a 
little hard to understand. Thank God we all 
share it instinctively now. He was speaking ex- 
citedly, addressing the crowd. They cheered him ; 
they were in a mood to cheer anybody. His face 
was thin with earnestness ; he was a spirit-man. 
He waved aside their applause with impatience. 
He was trying to inspire them with his own in- 
tensity. In the intervals l^etween the shouting, I 
caught some of his words, "I am setting out to 
fight the last war — the war of humanity which 
will bring universal peace and friendship to the 
world." 

A sailor behind me spat. He was drunk and 
feeling the need of sympathy. He began to ex- 
plain to me the reason. He was a fireman on one 
of the steamers in the basin and a reservist in 
the British Navy. He had received his orders 
that day to report back in England for duty; he 
knew that he was going to be torpedoed on his 
voyage across the Atlantic. How did he know? 
He had had a vision. Sailors always had visions 



THE LAST WAR 199 

before they were drowned. It was to combat this 
vision that he had got drunk. 

I shook him off irritably. One didn't require 
the superstitions of an alcohoHc imagination to 
emphasize the new terror which had overtaken the 
world. There was enough of fear in the air al- 
ready. All this spurious gaiety — what was it? 
Nothing but the chatter of lonely children who 
were afraid to listen to the silence — afraid lest 
they might hear the creaking footstep of death 
upon the stairs. And these candles, lighting up 
the fringes of the night — they were nothing but 
a vain pretence that the darkness had not gath- 
ered. 

But this spirit-man framed in the window, he 
was genuine and different. Yesterday we should 
have passed him in the street unnoticed ; to-day 
the mantle of prophecy clothed him. Within two 
months he might be dead — horribly dead with a 
bayonet through him. That thought was in the 
minds of all who watched him; it gave him an 
added authority. Yet he was not thinking of 
himself, of wounds, of death; he was not even 
thinking of France. He was thinking of human- 
ity: "I am setting out to fight the last war — the 
war of humanity which will bring imiversal peace 
and friendship to the world." 

Since the war started, how often have we heard 



200 OUT TO WIN 

that phrase — the last war! It became the battle- 
cry of all recruiting-men, who would have 
fought under no other circumstances, joined up 
now so that this might be the final carnage. Na- 
tions left their desks and went into battle volun- 
tarily, long before self-interest forced them, sim- 
ply because organised murder so disgusted them 
that they were determined by weight of numbers 
to make this exhibition of brutality the last. 

Before Europe burst into flames in 1914, we 
believed that the last war had been already 
fought. The most vivid endorsement of this be- 
lief came out of Germany in a book which, to my 
mind, up to that time was the strongest peace- 
argument in modern literature. It was so strong 
that the Kaiser's Government had the author ar- 
rested and every copy that could be found de- 
stroyed. Nevertheless, over a million were se- 
cretly printed and circulated in Germany, and it 
was translated into every major European lan- 
guage. The book I refer to was known under 
its American title as. The Human Slaughter- 
House. It told very simply how men who had 
played the army game of sticking dummies, found 
themselves called upon to stick their brother-men ; 
how they obeyed at first, then sickened at sight 
of their own handiwork, until finally the rank and 
file on both sides flung down their arms, banded 



THE LAST WAR 201 

themselves together and refused to carry out the 
orders of their generals. There was no declara- 
tion of peace ; in that moment national boundaries 
were abolished. 

In 19 1 2 this sounded probable. I remember the 
American press-comments. They all agreed that 
national prejudices had been broken down to such 
an extent by socialism and friendly intercourse, 
that never again would statesmen be able to 
launch attacks of nations against nations. Gov- 
ernments might declare war; the peoples whom 
they governed would merely overthrow them. 
The world had become too common-sense to com- 
mit murder on so vast a scale. 

Had it? The world in general might have : but 
Germany had not. The argument of The Human 
Slaughter-House proposed by a German in protest 
against what he foresaw was surely coming, 
turned out to be a bad guess. It made no allow- 
ance for what happens when a mad dog starts 
running through the world. One may be tender- 
hearted. One may not like killing dogs. One 
may even be an anti-vivisectionist ; but when a 
dog is mad, the only humanitarian thing to do is 
to kill it. If you don't, the women and children 
pay the penalty. 

We have had our illustration in Russia of what 
occurs when one side flings away its arms, prac- 



202 OUT TO WIN 

tising the idealistic reasoning's which this book 
propounds : the more brutal side conquers. While 
the Blonde Beast runs abroad spreading rabies, 
the only idealist who counts is the idealist who 
carries a rifle on his shoulder — the only gospel to 
which the world listens is the gospel which sa- 
viours are dying for. 

The last war ! It took us all by surprise. We 
had believed so utterly in peace; now we had to 
prove our faith by being prepared to die for it. 
If we did not die, this war would not be the last; 
it would be only the preface to the next. To para- 
phrase the words of Mr. Wells, "We had been 
prepared to take life in a certain way and life had 
taken us, as it takes every generation, in an en- 
tirely different way. We had been prepared to 
be altruistic pacifists, and ..." 

And here we are, in this year of 19 18, engaged 
upon the bloodiest war of all time, harnessing the 
muscle and brain-power of the universe to one 
end — that we may contrive new and yet more 
deadly methods of butchering our fellow men. 
The men whom we kill, we do not hate individ- 
ually. The men whom we kill, we do not see 
when they are dead. We scald them with liquid 
fire; we stifle them with gas; we drop volcanoes 
on them from the clouds ; we pull firing-levers 
three, ten, even fifteen miles away and hurl them 



THE LAST WAR 203 

into eternity unconfessed. And this we do with 
pity in our hearts, both for them and for our- 
selves. And why? Because they have given us 
no choice. They have promised, unless we defend 
ourselves, to snatch our souls from us and fashion 
them afresh into souls which shall bear the stamp 
of their own image. Of their souls we have seen 
samples; they date back to the dark ages — the 
souls of Cain, Judas and C-esar Borgia were not 
unlike them. Of what such souls are capable they 
have given us examples in Belgium, captured 
France and in the living dead whom they return 
by way of Evian. We would rather forego our 
bodies than so exchange our souls. A German- 
ised world is like a glimpse of madness ; the very 
thought strikes terror to the heart. Yet it is to 
Gemianise the world that Germany is waging war 
to-day — that she may confer upon us the benefits 
of her own proved swinishness. There is nothing 
left for us but to fight for our souls like men. 

The last war ! We believed that at first, but as 
the years dragged on the certainty became an 
optimism, the optimism a dream which we well- 
nigh knew to be impossible. We have always 
known that we would beat Germany — we have 
never doubted that. But could we beat her so 
thoroughly that she would never dare to reper- 
petrate this horror? Could we prove to her that 



204 OUT TO WIN 

war is not and never was a paying way of con- 
ducting business? Men began to smile when we 
spoke of this war as the last. "There have al- 
ways been wars," they said; "this one is not the 
last — there will be others." 

If it is not to be the last, we have cheated our- 
selves. Wt have cheated the men who have died 
for us. Our chief ideal in fighting is taken away. 
Many a lad who moulders in a stagnant trench, 
laid down his life for this sole purpose, that no 
children of the future ages should have to pass 
through his Gethsemane. He consciously gave 
himself up as a scapegoat, that the security of 
human sanity should be safeguarded against a 
recurrence of this enormity. The spirit-man, 
framed in the dusky window above the applaud- 
ing crowds in Quebec, was typical of all these 
men who have made the supreme sacrifice. His 
words utter the purpose that was in all their 
hearts, "I am setting out to light the last war — 
the war of humanity which will bring universal 
peace and freedom to the world." 

That promise was becoming a lie ; it is capable 
of fulfilment now. The dream became possible in 
April, 1917, when America took up her cross of 
martyrdom. Great Britain, France and the 
United States, the three great promise-keeping 
nations, are standing side by side. They together, 



THE LAST WAR 205 

if they will when the war is ended, can build an 
impregnable wall for peace about the world. The 
plunderer who knew that it was not Great Britain, 
nor France, nor America, but all three of them 
united as Allies that he had to face, no matter 
how tempted he was to prove that armed force 
meant big business, would be persuaded to expand 
his commerce by more legitimate methods. 
Whether this dream is to be accomplished will 
be decided not upon any battlefield but in the 
hearts of the civilians of all three countries — par- 
ticularly in those of America and Great Britain. 
The soldiers who have fought and suffered to- 
gether, can never be anything but friends. 

My purpose in writing this account of America 
in France has been to give grounds for under- 
standing and appreciation; it has been to prove 
that the highest reward that either America or 
Great Britain can gain as a result of its heroism 
is an Anglo-American alliance, which will fortify 
the world against all such future terrors. There 
never ought to have been anything but alliance 
between my two great countries. They speak the 
same tongue, share a common heritage and pursue 
the same loyalties. Had we not blundered in our 
destinies, there would never have been occasion 
for anything but generosity. 

The opportunity for generosity has come again. 



2o6 OUT TO WIN 

Any man or woman who, whether by design or 
carelessness, attempts to mar this growing friend- 
ship is perpetrating a crime against humanity as 
grave as that of the first armed Hun who stepped 
across the Belgian threshold. It were better for 
them that mill-stones were hung about their necks 
and they were cast into the sea, than . . . 

God is giving us our chance. The magna- 
nimities of the Anglo-Saxon races are rising to 
greet one another. If those magnanimities are 
welcomed and made permanent, our soldier-ideal- 
ists will not have died in vain. Then we shall 
fulfil for them their promise, "We are setting out 
to fight the last war." 



THE END 



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